Re: top: 50% iowait, 900M swap in use

From: Graham Lee (graham.lee_at_wadham.oxford.ac.invalid.uk)
Date: 12/04/03 

Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2003 14:14:33 +0000

Vikas Agnihotri wrote:

> top shows my system as having 50% iowait (leading to very little cpu idle)
> and 900M swap im use (I have 1GB physical RAM)
>

This may not be the case for you, but last time I saw 2 CPUs on a 4 CPU box
get completely tied up in IOWait, a disk had failed.

> How do I go about identifying which processes are using the 900M swap
> space? Also, which processes are the cause/effect of the 50% iowait?
>

Pressing 'o' in top will allow you to change the sort field, then I suppose
'size' is the best field to sort on to display total temporary store used.
ps -o vsz should work too, can't confirm this as I have GNU ps installed :) 

-- 
Graham Lee
Wadham College
Oxford