iotop vs runit

iotop is a free Linux program that identifies processes generating high input/output activity and lists them by I/O usage. The display can show accumulated I/O or bandwidth, with optional read, write, swap-in and I/O-percentage columns. Monitoring can target selected process IDs or users, or show processes and threads across the machine. Interactive and batch modes support iteration counts, configurable delays and timestamps in batch output. Command-line filters narrow processes by TID or command using a regular expression. Installation guidance covers Debian-derived distributions, Fedora, CentOS/RHEL, Void, Arch and Alpine Linux; source builds use make after development dependencies are installed. The project is GPL-2.0+ licensed, but installation and use require root access. Version 1.31 is listed as the latest release. Its tag has a verified committer signature, although the signing key has expired.

runit is a free Unix init scheme that supervises services and can replace sysvinit or other init schemes. It runs on GNU/Linux, BSD systems, MacOSX and Solaris, and can be adapted to other Unix operating systems. As process 1, it manages boot, normal operation and shutdown in three stages. The runsv component launches a service's run program and restarts it if it exits; an optional finish program and log service can also be used. The sv utility reports status and provides controls to start, stop, restart, pause or signal supervised services. For logs, svlogd can filter messages and write automatically rotated logs. The chpst utility changes process state and sets limits for resources such as memory, open files, process count, output size, core size and CPU time. runsvdir can start and monitor runsv processes for up to 1,000 service subdirectories. runit can supervise services alongside an existing init scheme without replacing it. The maker provides source and installation instructions, including manual installation without root access. Its documentation warns that UDP logging is unreliable and should be confined to private networks.