On my RHEL 4 machine, I was downloading a huge file (2.5GB)..I was checking the output of vmstat and was especially curious about seeing the disk IO using bi and bo. I know iostat is a better tool suited for this but didn't have it installed on this machine.Anyways, I was expecting bi (bytes in) to be high during the download but found the exact opposite...bo (bytes out) was very high during the download where as bi was mostly 0 with occasional numbers??Also, without iostat, is there a better tool than vmstat that is available Out of the Box in a Red Hat machine?
vmstat IO stats: why the high bo during a download?
linux;hard disk;performance;io