[Novalug] ext3 and noatime

[Ed T. Toton III]

Thus spake Mark Smith:

>> noatime should not impact make and similar utilities, since they only 
>> really care about "mtime" not "atime".  I know of no utilities that 
>> rely on atime for anything useful.  Any useful caching utilities might, 
>> but for the most part, you'd be using the cache itself for read not the 
>> underlying disk.
>
> i'm pretty sure the tmp cleaner uses atime.  it'll only remove files 
> that have not been accessed in a while.  i can't think of anything else 
> off the top of my head though.
>
> it's not shocking that removing atime updates improves performance. 
> any time you avoid a write it's a performance win.


It's useful to have in your bag of tricks since under most circumstances 
it's causing completely unnecessary writes. The only other thing I can 
think of might be some sort of queuing mechanism that tries to rely on the 
filesystem instead of indexing, but I don't know of any specifically.

Using noatime and nodiratime is a good idea with flash-based storage as 
well since it's the writes that cause wear and tear on those.

I've never had problems with it either.


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- Ed T. Toton III, RHCE --|-- www.necrobones.com -- ed.toton.org -
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