Re: [PLUG] Using 'noatime' in fstab?

[David Coulson <david@davidcoulson.net>]

The only reason I heard of doing this is that if you have a power saving 
system (laptop, for example), you avoid spinning up the disk all the 
time to update atime.

I can't imagine not updating atime is going to buy you much in terms of 
performance. I rsync some boxes with >1m files so I could try it out, 
but I doubt it'll be noticeable.

I use atime a lot to 'clean up' servers - Junk in /tmp and such with 
atimes >1day can usually be trashed. Also used it today to remove old 
disk-based sessions from a web application that didn't clean up after 
itself. For most systems I say you probably won't miss it.

JP Vossen wrote:
> I read someplace that you can reduce wear and tear on hard drives by 
> including noatime in the mount options.  I already do this for the one 
> system I have using a CF card, but I was wondering about it just in general.
>
> I have several servers that rsync themselves various places for backups. 
> That means that every time I rsync the entire filesystem, a gazillion 
> atimes are being updated for essentially no reason.  Ditto for the 
> s/locate indexer.  I can't recall ever using an atime for anything 
> (ctime and mtime yes, atime no).
>
> Can anyone give me a good reason not to do this on some/all of my 
> machines?  All of my machines are ext3, some have H/W EIDE RAID, others 
> have software (MDM) mirroring, some are just plain old hard drives, if 
> it matters.  Most are Debian or Ubuntu but I have a couple of CentOS4 
> boxes too.  And what about for machines in a VM?
>
> Thanks,
> JP
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> JP Vossen, CISSP            |:::======|        jp{at}jpsdomain{dot}org
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