cached data to be written to disk

[Alvin]

On Wednesday 24 June 2009 16:14:52 Willy K. Hamra wrote:
> hello list,
> is there any program to check the quantity of the data cached in memory
> awaiting to be written to disk? or even better, watch a graph og IO
> operations per application? for example, in Proces Explorer on windows,
> i can add a column of IO graph, which shows each process' IO in a graph
> beside itm any such tool on linux?
> i believe most of my bottlenecks, and the few firefox freezes i'm
> suffering are IO related, when FF is waiting for it's data to be
> written, it hangs, and starts eating memory in HUGE quantities till the
> freeze is over.

Maybe iotop is what you need:

Description: simple top-like I/O monitor
 iotop does for I/O usage what top(1) does for CPU usage. It watches I/O usage 
information output by the Linux kernel (requires 2.6.20 or later)
 and displays a table of current I/O usage by processes on the system. Handy 
for answering the question "Why is my disk churning so much?".
Homepage: http://guichaz.free.fr/iotop/