Linux iostat iowait tools offer us an insight into the Linux system perfomance. Find out how. 

At Bobcares, we offer solutions for every query, big and small, as a part of our Server Management Services.

Let’s take a look at how our Support Team is ready to help customers with Linux iostat iowait tools and how to use them.

What are Linux iostat iowait tools

If you are looking for more information about iowait and iostat, you have come to the right place. Iowait is the value of idle time when there are outstanding disk I/O requests. In other words, it is a performance stat value that offers us an insight into the Linux system performance.

I/O wait= time waiting for I/O completion

On the other hand, we can use the iostat command to monitor system input/output statistics for device loading. This is done by observing the duration when the devices are active in relation to their average transfer rates. Furthermore, the iostat command results in three types of reports:

• CPU Utilization report
• Device utilization report
• Network filesystem report

All About iowait

As seen above, iowait indicates the idle time of a CPU or CPUs when it could be processing outstanding requests. In some cases, it also indicates a bottleneck in throughput. According to our Support Engineers, a high iowait value is a reason for further investigation.

For instance, server storage tends to be slower than CPU performance. Due to this, I/O wait may mislead us, especially for random read/write workloads. Since iowait measures only CPU performance and not storage I/O, we are led to believe that the CPI is idle.

According to our Support Engineers, we have to rely on the iowait information as well as end-user experience, transaction throughput, overall application health as well as database query health to determine poor Linux system performance.

Tools to monitor I/O wait

Here are a few of the tools we can use to monitor I/O wait on Linux:

• atop
• iostat
• iotop
• ps
• strace
• lsof

The iostat tool as mentioned earlier monitors system input/output statistics for device loading.

How to reduce I/O wait related issues

1. Optimize the application’s code as well as database queries.
2. Ensure Linux system and software versions are up-to-date.
3. Confirm free memory is available.
4. Tweak the system, storage device as well as Linux kernel for better storage performance and lifespan.

In case the above tips do not help, our Support Techs recommend upgrading storage devices to faster NVMe, SSD, or other high throughput storage devices.

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Conclusion

To sum up, our skilled Support Engineers at Bobcares demonstrated how to use Linux iostat iowait tools.