IO statistics
This page describes the IO statistics that is collected at the IO-scheduler level. It describes the information about the container's real work with disks. This is different from what shown by IO accounting.
Contents
Kernel interface
The stats are reported via the proc files. Currently it is available in kernels starting from 028stab069.1.
Files
/proc/bc/$id/iostat
- statistics for beancounter $id
/proc/bc/iostat
- statistics for all beancounters
Format
Files contains one row for each disk-beancounter pair.
Columns are:
| N | name | type | description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | disk | string | Disk device name, e.g. sda or hda, or a special queue (like fuse or flush) |
| 2 | ub id | integer | Beancounter id |
| 3 | state | char | currently unused (always '.') |
| 4 | busy queues | integer | The number of queues with requests (see below) |
| 5 | on dispatch | integer | currently unused (always '0') |
| 6 | activations count | integer | currently unused (always '0') |
| 7 | wait time | integer | Total time in waiting state in milliseconds |
| 8 | used time | integer | Total time in active state in milliseconds. |
| 9 | requests completed | integer | The number of completed requests |
| 10 | sectors transferred | integer | The number of 512 sectors transferred (includes both read and write) |
New columns might be added at the end of row in future.
Separate stats exist for fuse and flush, that only report requests and sectors stats (others are always 0).
Queues
Each beancounter may have many queues with requests. Typically there's one queue for each task with synchronous (e.g. reads) requests and and the fixed amount of them for asynchronous requests (e.g. cached writes) for each beancounter.
Interpretation
Disk usage times
The disk usage should be reported in a top-like style. Consider the following code
read_iostat(&a); sleep(interval); read_iostat(&b);
Now the following numbers should be calculated and shown.
active = sum(b.used_time - a.used_time) * 100 / interval; waiting = sum(b.wait_time - b.wait_time) * 100 / interval; idle = 100 - (active + waiting);
The sum function sums up the times for all disk for the beancounter.
Additionally two more values should be shown for beancounter.
IO speed
The value
sum(b.transfered_sectors - a.transfered_sectors) * 512 / interval
denotes the speed of the IO performed by the beancounter.
Average request size
The value
(b.transfered_sectors - a.transfered_sectors)/(b.requests_completed - a.requests_completed)
denotes the average request size for a beancounter to a particular disk.
