First of all, I found a similar question but it doesn't really solve my problem. I am trying to discover if the USB bus for a device I am using is the bottleneck in my program.

How can I monitor a USB bus (similar to how gnome-system-monitor works) to show bus utilization? Basically I want to identify when the bus is being 'maxed' out. I guess what I am looking for is some interface for usbmon, as that appears like it would do what I need.

This came about from testing the USRP and GNU Radio. I am running into a situation where it appears that the USB bus could be a limiting factor, so I ask the more general question of USB performance monitoring.

Since usbmon provides the length of each packet transferred, I would approach this by writing a quick program to parse the 0u file (which has data for all USB devices.) It would pick out the USB bus and device numbers, then keep a running total of the packet length field in both directions for each device.

This will then give you the amount of data transferred per device, in each direction. If you print it once a second you'll get a pretty good idea of each device's throughput. Note that it won't include any USB overhead, but if you compare the figures to a device that is able to saturate the available bandwidth you'll know whether you're getting close to the limit.

Use usbtop, it gives a nice overview of what devices are using how much bandwidth:

Bus ID 1 (USB bus number 1) To device   From device

  Device ID 1 :             0.00 kb/s   0.00 kb/s

  Device ID 2 :             0.00 kb/s   0.00 kb/s

Bus ID 2 (USB bus number 2) To device   From device

  Device ID 1 :             0.00 kb/s   0.00 kb/s

  Device ID 4 :             141.73 kb/s 13777.68 kb/s

  Device ID 5 :             9.98 kb/s   11.24 kb/s

  Device ID 6 :             0.00 kb/s   0.00 kb/s

  Device ID 7 :             0.00 kb/s   0.00 kb/s

  Device ID 8 :             141.71 kb/s 15257.26 kb/s

I've wrote a pair of shell scripts to get the throughput from a USB device. If someone what to use it, you can find it in this post.

1. usbtop:

As sebas points out, usbtop seems to give a certain minimum level of useful information (although it could be much better), so I recommend it.

Here's how to install it:

1. 
   

   Clone the git repo:

   
   
   

   git clone https://github.com/aguinet/usbtop.git 
   
   

   
   


2. 
   

   Navigate to the directory that just got created from git clone:

   
   
   

   cd usbtop
   
   

   
   


3. 
   

   Install dependencies:

   
   
   

   sudo apt update 
   
   sudo apt install libboost-dev libpcap-dev libboost-thread-dev libboost-system-dev 
   
   

   
   


4. 
   

   Create local build directory & cd into it:

   
   
   

   mkdir _build && cd _build 
   
   

   
   


5. 
   

   Run cmake to prepare to build usbtop from source:

   
   
   

   cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release .. 
   
   

   
   


6. 
   

   Build usbtop from source:

   
   
   

   make 
   
   

   
   


7. 
   

   Install usbtop:

   
   
   

   sudo make install 
   
   

   
   


8. 
   

   Load the usbmon kernel module to open access to USB buses (I think this is what that does, but I know it's required):

   
   
   

   sudo modprobe usbmon 
   
   

   
   


9. 
   

   Run usbtop (if this doesn't work, use sudo usbtop instead):

   
   
   

   usbtop 
   
   

   
   

If I missed anything let me know in the comments.

Install References:

• https://github.com/aguinet/usbtop/blob/master/INSTALL


• https://github.com/aguinet/usbtop/issues/3#issuecomment-274325720

2. Update: You can also use iostat instead:

sudo apt install sysstat

Run at 1-second intervals with:

iostat -d 1

OR with 0.1-second intervals with:

watch -n 0.1 iostat

Sample output of iostat -d 1:

References:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/3561/how-do-i-monitor-disk-activity-on-a-specific-drive

Additional reading:

https://www.znetlive.com/blog/monitor-disk-io-windows-linux/

Related:

• https://askubuntu.com/questions/276669/how-to-monitor-disk-activity


• https://askubuntu.com/questions/436354/how-to-check-the-disk-activity-of-my-hard-drive


• https://askubuntu.com/questions/87035/how-to-check-hard-disk-performance