Measuring and visualizing I/O latency with ioping and gnuplot

Reading and writing data from mass storage (volumes) is a quite common pattern in software. However, some time elapses between starting the I/O request (i.e., reading or writing data) and the completion of the request. The elapsed time to complete the request is called I/O latency. Older magnetic hard disks need some time to position the head on the right track of the magnetic disk. Also, newer flash-based disks like SSDs need some time to read the data. In addition, at common cloud providers, different types of block volumes are available that provide a different I/O latency. With the software ioping, this latency can be measured.