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Jul 20, 2026 · Operations

Diagnosing Disk I/O Spikes That Freeze Linux Systems with iostat and iotop

When a Linux server shows high iowait and becomes unresponsive, this guide walks you through using iostat, iotop, blktrace, fio and bpftrace to pinpoint the offending process, understand the full I/O stack, and apply kernel‑level and filesystem tuning to resolve the bottleneck.