Is there a reliable way to tell how much time is I/O

I am timing some code and I would like to tell how much of the time taken is due to reading the data in from disk. I don’t believe the result that time gives me. For example, I have a 1.3GB file and if I run wc I get

time wc largefile.file 
  50000000  150000000 1316665179 largefile.file

real    0m26.835s
user    0m18.363s
sys     0m0.495s

It can’t possibly have taken < 0.5 seconds to read in the file from my old hard drive.

Is there a reliable way to tell how much of the time was due to I/O?

Further details for why I don’t see how to interpret time. If I do

time cat largefile.file > /dev/null

real    0m24.230s
user    0m0.060s
sys     0m1.473s

then it is tempting to say that about 22.5 seconds are spent on I/O. But the wc figure from above implies that it is 8 seconds. These two figures are not consistent.

sys means cpu time spent in-kernel, but you want io-wait time.

Googling turned up another stack exchange answer pointing at “per-process iowait from /proc/$pid/stat“. (And maybe need to run the programmer under a debugger and set a breakpoint on exit() / _exit(), so you can read out the iowait before the process goes away ?).

Often I just calculate it by subtracting the cpu time (user+sys) from the realtime. That assumes the process doesn’t wait for things you don’t count as “IO”.