Ever needed to check the I/O usage of apps? If so, you probably tried searching for an iotop port, a Python script for Linux--only to find none and either write one in a hurry or manually check /proc/ yourself.

Luckily for you, XDA Forum Moderator and Recognized Developer laufersteppenwolf has written a shell script to replicate the original features of iotop. It will allow you to examine I/O loads/usage for every process, see the total amount of read and written bytes or even the current read/write speeds.

Before you use the script, though, you'll have to make sure you have the following:

  1. A rooted device.
  2. A kernel with I/O accounting enabled. This usually isn't the case by default, but you can always ask your kernel developer to enable the necessary configs (or enable them yourself if you're compiling your own kernel — if not, you unfortunately can't do anything else).

This can be particularly handy if you're experiencing lag but CPU isn't the issue (in which case you could fire iotop up and check if any process is causing a lot of I/O activity in the background), or if you're trying to debug your app. If you'd like to find out more, visit the iotop for Android forum thread now to see how to install and use it.