Disabling atime

[Douglas McClendon]

Ralf Corsepius wrote:

> A friend of mine experimented with atime/noatime yesterday:
> 
> These were his results:
> 
> Test case: A heavy weight compiler-job
> 
> Default /etc/fstab
>   real    5m18.226s
>   user    4m44.557s
>   sys     1m17.193s
> User+Sys: 365.750
> 
> Rebooted -- all filesystems noatime,nodiratime
>   real    5m4.256s
>   user    4m36.841s
>   sys     1m8.364s
> User+Sys: 346.750
> 
> new / old = .9465

+1 for real numbers!!!

Though the test would seem better if there was an explicit reboot before 
the first test, to make sure caches are in basically the same state.


> 
> [Fedora-7, i386 on an AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+]
> 
> Way off from the figures the proponents of notime are reporting.

I didn't see that many people reporting numbers.  But are you kidding, 
5+% is HUGE!  (both sarcasm and sincerity).  I mean, for something that 
is basically FREE.

And you also failed to remind people of the other key HUGE benefit (I 
think, if I've been following this correctly)- that (laptop) drives 
would never get needless writes for every file read.  I.e. if I 
understand correctly, reading a file thats in cache won't cause the 
drive to need to be spun up to update the atime.

-dmc