How to check the processes that cause High Disk Usage (Hign I/O operations)

There can be multiple reasons for the high disk usage (IO). In order to isolate the process that is responsible for the highest IO usage, we can do the following tasks:

1. Install iotop by following [1] and execute iotop --only command to get the list of processes that do I/O operations. We will be able to get an idea about the reason for the high disk usage after identifying the processes with high I/O.
2. When the available physical memory is low, disk usage can also get increased. Therefore, execute free -m command and check the memory usage of the machine.
3. Stop the servers one at the time and check whether stopping of any server significantly decrease the rate of disk usage.

After Identifying the process, we can further troubleshoot the functionalities to identify the root cause of the high disk usage.

[1] https://lintut.com/install-iotop-on-linux/