The iotop utility in Linux: purpose + installation

The iotop utility is a Linux command-line tool designed to monitor and display input/output (I/O) activity on your system. It allows you to monitor in real time the processes that are consuming the most disk activity.

Features of iotop

Some key features of iotop include:

1. Displaying processes sorted by I/O usage.
2. Displaying total I/O activity for each process.
3. Support for filtering by process, user, or user group.
4. Display of the current I/O rate for each process.
5. Ability to stop, pause, or resume I/O monitoring for selected processes.

The iotop utility can be useful for identifying processes that significantly load the system with I/O, as well as for identifying any possible disk or I/O bottlenecks in the system. Use special commands to install iotop on different Linux distributions.

Debian/Ubuntu and its derivatives

sudo apt-get install iotop

Fedora

sudo dnf install iotop

CentOS/RHEL

sudo yum install iotop

After installation, you can run iotop from the command line using the command:

sudo iotop

Note that superuser (root) privileges may be required to run iotop.

How do I uninstall the program?

To uninstall the installed Iotop package on Linux, you can use the apt-getor yum command depending on your distribution.

Debian/Ubuntu

1. Open a terminal.
2. Type the command sudo apt-get remove iotop and press Enter.
3. Enter the administrator (root) password if required.
4. Confirm the removal by entering y, if required.
5. Wait for the removal process to complete.

CentOS/Fedora

1. Open a terminal.
2. Type the command sudo yum remove iotop and press Enter.
3. Enter the administrator (root) password.
4. Confirm the removal by entering y if required.
5. Wait for the removal process to complete.

After performing these steps, the Iotop package should be completely removed from your system.