I/O wait (iowait) is the percentage of time that the CPU (or CPUs) were idle during which the system had pending disk I/O requests.

What causes CPU IO wait?

iowait is time that the processor/processors are waiting (i.e. is in an idle state and does nothing), during which there in fact was outstanding disk I/O requests. This usually means that the block devices (i.e. physical disks, not memory) is too slow, or simply saturated.

How do I check IO wait?

To identify whether I/O is causing system slowness you can use several commands but the easiest is the unix command top . From the CPU(s) line you can see the current percentage of CPU in I/O Wait; The higher the number the more cpu resources are waiting for I/O access.