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I'm looking for an utility that could show me how much of a bandwidth each process are using. It should just print the data and exit as I want to feed that list into conky.

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4 Answers

You can try NetHogs.



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Almost exactly what I need but it just doesn't work :( –  vava Aug 31 '09 at 17:24
Well, what doesn't work? Any errors? Doesn't it start at all? Console output? –  Milde Sep 1 '09 at 7:14
Thank you very much. –  Saeed Zarinfam Sep 24 '12 at 11:27
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There is quite a few listed here.

My favorites however remain iftop and tcpdump. Wireshark is also a very good option.

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I have ethical issues with Wireshark, if not alone on the network... Unless you have a way to make it probe only the localhost, in which case I'm interested. –  Gnoupi Aug 31 '09 at 14:18
If you don't enable promiscuous mode it should only capture traffic directed to your host. –  Amuck Aug 31 '09 at 15:57
Huh, not one of those utilities can tell me which process are using most bandwidth and that's what I'm after. –  vava Aug 31 '09 at 17:25
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Check out the answer here: link

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Actually it does, assuming you have a few programs in mind you'd like to check. You can manually monitor each one based on the port it uses. –  th3dude Aug 31 '09 at 17:54
Yeah, would be really fun checking Azureus that way :) –  vava Sep 1 '09 at 2:27
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Try atop ... to get the most out of it you may have to enable some additional kernel patches (I/O accounting patches).

If atop isn't an option then use netstat -anp --inet (as root) to provide a listing of which TCP/UDP ports are in use by which processes (or possibly use lsof for that). From there simply iterate over each process that's got an open socket and either attach to it using ltrace -S or strace to look at the reads, writes, sends and receives, or use tcpdump with a filter specifying your local IP address(es) and the TCP/UDP ports that were listed.

atop is certainly the most convenient of these ... if you have it and the necessary kernel support installed. In the past I've had customers and employers set up special systems (different from their production images) for the sole purpose of supporting I/O profiling using atop. However these other techniques will get you there.

I'm sure we could also do something using SystemTap ... but I don't know of any easy pre-cooked recipes for doing this. SystemTap is very much a programming analysis tool.

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