Purpose: iotop identifies processes that use high amounts of input/output requests on a machine and lists them by I/O usage.
License: The project says iotop is licensed GPL-2.0+.
Runtime requirement: Installing and using the program requires root access.
Linux packages: The project lists packages or installation instructions for Debian-derived distributions, Fedora, CentOS/RHEL, Void, Arch, and Alpine Linux.
Build: The project documents building from source with make after installing development dependencies.
Monitoring: Options let users monitor selected process IDs or users, or show processes and threads across the machine.
Output modes: The program supports interactive and batch modes, iteration counts, configurable delays, and timestamps in batch output.
I/O display: The interface can show accumulated I/O or bandwidth and can hide or show columns such as read, write, swap-in, and I/O percentage.
Filtering: The command line supports filtering processes by TID and command using a regular expression.
Release: The releases page lists version 1.31 as the latest release.
Release signing: The release page says the version 1.31 tag has a verified committer signature and that the signing key has expired.
Support and community: The project recommends filing pull requests on GitHub and says its community gathers in the #iotop channel on Libera.Chat.
Maintainers: The project lists Tomas Matejicek and Boian Bonev as current maintainers.
Price from: Free

Where it ranks on Freedom251

Best Process Monitoring Software in 2026#7 of 26

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Sources

github.com/Tomas-M/iotop· checked 4 Oct 2026
github.com/Tomas-M/iotop/releases· checked 4 Oct 2026