High Disk I/O rate. How to investigate

Question

One of my servers is getting very high Disk I/Os. The problem is that the disk I/Os are constantly increasing. The server just have simple LAMP configuration and there shouldnt be any disk operation ideally.

http://monitor.wingify.com/munin/visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/dev5.visualwebsiteoptimizer.com-iostat.html

Any help on how can I investigate as to what is causing this high disk I/O and how can I fix it. top / htop etc isnt giving me good information worth debugging

Thanks

Answer 1

Try use iotop to find active I/O process.

Also, try remount xvda with noatime option and add "iostat -dx 2" output from host system.

Answer 2

I second iotop, it's a great way to see what programmes are using your disk.