disk space usage by process in ubuntu 12.04

Question

Is there any way to know how much disk space currently running process is using? I have checked ps and top command but could not find out.

Background behind this question:

I have a server which is get filled 20Gb each day. I could not find out where it is taking this space. With some random advice i ran

fuser -m -u /dev/xxx

and killed the processes it shows. After restarting the server i see almos t100Gb space is freed. And again server is getting filled up by previous rate. But killing services this time is not giving me any space. I also have checked log files but no such issue there.

Answer 1

You can use the iodump perl script :

wget http://aspersa.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/iodump

Turn on Block Dump

echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/block_dump

Run the script for a while (exit with Control & C)

while true; do sleep 1; sudo dmesg -c; done | perl iodump

You'll get a statistic like this:

^C# Caught SIGINT.
TASK                   PID      TOTAL       READ      WRITE      DIRTY DEVICES
jbd2/sda3-8            620         40          0         40          0 sda3
jbd2/sda1-8            323         21          0         21          0 sda1
#1                    4746         11          0         11          0 sda3
flush-8:0             2759          7          0          7          0 sda1, sda3
command-not-fou       9703          4          4          0          0 sda1
mpegaudioparse8       8167          2          2          0          0 sda3
bash                  9704          1          1          0          0 sda1
bash                  9489          1          0          1          0 sda3
mount.ecryptfs_       9698          1          1          0          0 sda1

Do not forget to disable kernel Block Dump

echo 0 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/block_dump

Source: http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2009/08/23/how-to-find-per-process-io-statistics-on-linux/