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biolatency(8) System Manager's Manual biolatency(8)

NAME

biolatency - Summarize block device I/O latency as a histogram.

SYNOPSIS

biolatency [-h] [-T] [-Q] [-m] [-D] [interval [count]]

DESCRIPTION

biolatency traces block device I/O (disk I/O), and records the distribution of I/O latency (time). This is printed as a histogram either on Ctrl-C, or after a given interval in seconds.

The latency of the disk I/O is measured from the issue to the device to its completion. A -Q option can be used to include time queued in the kernel.

This tool uses in-kernel eBPF maps for storing timestamps and the histogram, for efficiency.

This works by tracing various kernel blk_*() functions using dynamic tracing, and will need updating to match any changes to these functions.

Since this uses BPF, only the root user can use this tool.

REQUIREMENTS

CONFIG_BPF and bcc.

OPTIONS

-h Print usage message.
-T
Include timestamps on output.
-m
Output histogram in milliseconds.
-D
Print a histogram per disk device.
interval
Output interval, in seconds.
count
Number of outputs.

EXAMPLES

Summarize block device I/O latency as a histogram:
# biolatency
Print 1 second summaries, 10 times:
# biolatency 1 10
Print 1 second summaries, using milliseconds as units for the histogram, and
include timestamps on output: # biolatency -mT 1
Include OS queued time in I/O time:
# biolatency -Q
Show a latency histogram for each disk device separately:
# biolatency -D

FIELDS

usecs
Microsecond range
msecs
Millisecond range
count
How many I/O fell into this range
distribution
An ASCII bar chart to visualize the distribution (count column)

OVERHEAD

This traces kernel functions and maintains in-kernel timestamps and a histogram, which are asynchronously copied to user-space. This method is very efficient, and the overhead for most storage I/O rates (< 10k IOPS) should be negligible. If you have a higher IOPS storage environment, test and quantify the overhead before use.

SOURCE

This is from bcc.
https://github.com/iovisor/bcc

Also look in the bcc distribution for a companion _examples.txt file containing example usage, output, and commentary for this tool.

OS

Linux

STABILITY

Unstable - in development.

AUTHOR

Brendan Gregg

SEE ALSO

biosnoop(8)
2015-08-20 USER COMMANDS