This alert presents the average I/O latency
over the last 10 seconds. I/O latency
is the time that is required to complete a single I/O operation on a block device.
This alert might indicate that your disk is under high load, or that the disk is slow.
Use iotop
to see the processes that are the main I/O consumers:
sudo iotop
If you don't have iotop
installed, then install it
Investigate the top I/O consumers and determine if these processes are expected to consume that much I/O, or if there might be an issue with these processes.
If you find that any unnecessary or unexpected processes are heavily utilizing your disk, try stopping or closing those processes to reduce the load on the disk. Always double-check if the process you want to close is necessary.
Make sure your disk is not facing any hardware issues or failures. For this, you can use the smartmontools
package, which contains the smartctl
utility. If it's not installed, you can install it.
To check the disk health, run:
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdX
Replace /dev/sdX
with the correct disk device identifier (for example, /dev/sda
).
If your disk consistently experiences high latency and you have already addressed any performance issues with the running processes, consider upgrading your disk to a faster drive (e.g., replace an HDD with an SSD).