plan9-gpl/sys/man/4/iostats

.TH IOSTATS 4
.SH NAME
iostats \- file system to measure I/O
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B iostats
[
.B -d
]
[
.B -f
.I dbfile
]
.I cmd
[
.I args...
]
.SH DESCRIPTION
.I Iostats
is a user-level file server that interposes itself between a program
and the regular file server, which
allows it to gather statistics of file system
use at the level of the Plan 9 file system protocol, 9P.
After a program
exits a report is printed on standard error.
.PP
The report consists of three sections.
The first section reports the amount
of user data in
.B read
and
.B write
messages sent by the program and the average rate at
which the data was transferred.
The
.B protocol
line reports the amount
of data sent as message headers, that is,
protocol overhead.
The
.B rpc
line reports the
total number of file system transactions.
.PP
The second section gives
the number of messages, the fastest, slowest, and average turn around
time and the amount of data involved with each 9P
message type.
The final section gives an I/O summary for each file used
by the program in terms of opens, reads and writes.
.PP
If the
.B -d
flag is present, a debugging log including all traffic
is written to
.I dbfile
(default
.BR iostats.out ).
.SH EXAMPLE
Display summary of file I/O incurred by
.IR ls (1):
.IP
.EX
iostats ls
.EE
.PP
Start a new shell, displaying all 9P traffic caused by the shell or its children:
.IP
.EX
iostats -df /fd/1 rc
.EE
.SH SOURCE
.B /sys/src/cmd/iostats
.SH SEE ALSO
.IR dup (3)
.SH BUGS
Poor clock resolution means that large amounts of I/O must be done to
get accurate rate figures.
.PP
Can be fooled by programs that do fresh mounts outside its purview,
or by the use of names of files with content that can vary by process (e.g.,
.LR #d ,
.LR /dev/cons ).