io

*** is there i/o wait? (wa: cpu time spent waiting for i/o) ***

# vmstat -SM 1 10
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- -----cpu-----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa st
 1  1      0  26202    214   1857    0    0    30   168  442   97  6  1 86  6  0
 2  1      0  26202    214   1857    0    0    12  1424 11973 49038  4  1 90  5  0
 0  1      0  26203    214   1857    0    0    12  1488 11803 49221  4  1 90  5  0
 0  1      0  26203    214   1857    0    0    12  1384 10354 41779  3  1 91  5  0
 0  1      0  26203    214   1857    0    0    16  1520 11935 48012  4  1 90  5  0
 1  1      0  26202    214   1857    0    0    12  1396 10635 44548  4  1 91  5  0
 0  1      0  26201    214   1857    0    0    12  2788 13849 53045  4  2 88  6  0
 0  1      0  26202    214   1857    0    0    16  1468 14214 58107  5  1 89  5  0
 0  1      0  26202    214   1857    0    0    12  1504 13806 56521  4  1 89  5  0
 0  1      0  26202    214   1857    0    0    12  1420 11390 49139  4  1 90  5  0

*** what processes are in a state of being blocked? ***

# ps aux | grep D
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root       906  0.4  0.0      0     0 ?        D    21:24   0:22 [jbd2/dm-1-8]
root      1876  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        D    21:24   0:00 [flush-253:1]

*** strace ***

strace -ff -s10000 -p process_id
add the -eopen flag to above to see which files are being accessed / modified