Kyle R . Burton on Wed, 27 Feb 2002 15:40:15 +0100


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[PLUG] Survey says: noatime?


A co-worker and I have been looking into the area of system performance 
tuning, specificly as it relates to databases.  We've come across a 
filesystem technique mentioned in some of the articles we found:

  http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-fs2.html
  http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5840

The technique is to mount the file systems with the noatime option.  Trying
out a simple little query in postgres without noatime on reiserfs we had
a query time of 6.31s, after adding noatime (and rebooting, I tried just
-o remount,noatime but it didn't seem to take effect untill the reboot) the
time for the same query dropped to 2.09s.  I was surprised that it was such
a dramatic difference.

My question to the list is, am I hurting myself by not having the last
access time updated?  I know how to look at a file's atime (-A in perl, or
ls -u) but I don't know of anything that uses or relies on it.  What is
atime typicly used for?  Is this something I can just disable for all of
my file systems to get a performance boost?  If it's such a desierable
thing to do with very little drawbacks, why isn't it a standard option?

The articles mention using chattr +A to set it for specific files or
directories, but it seems that reiserfs doesn't support chattr.  What
kinds of experiences do you have with journaling file systems and 
performance?

Thanks,
Kyle

-- 

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