command to get file i/o stats in linux

[brettgrant99]

Our IT department are claiming that some simulations that I am running are I/O intensive, and I was wondering how I can check that out.

I am pretty sure that I could figure it out with profiled code, but I was hoping that I could run some command like "time" with the executable to see how much I/O it is using.

The system has a lot of users, so unless we stop all of those, iostat doesn't seem to work.

The GNU version of time is supposed to do it, but it says that there are zero reads/writes. I know that the simulation reads an input file and writes an output file, so I don't know that I trust that answer.

I wouldn't mind knowing how to do it on a Mac, either.

Thanks for any help/suggestions.
Brett

[robinwmills]

There are some tools around to help with this. I often use fseventer to "snoop" on applications to find out which files are being accessed (read or written). Take a look. I think there is a command-line version. Additionally, you'll find other code mentioned on the web site for fseventer - and you'll probably find that useful in looking for other possible solutions.

I'm rather suprised that your IT department is concerned about this. What's their angle, the amount of traffic you are creating on the network?

[brettgrant99]

I am running on a HPC cluster (kindof like xgrid) and they are going to increase the number of computers on it, so they are worried that the additional computers will saturate the network storage.

I'll check out that fseventer.

Thanks,
Brett