Disabling atime

[Benjamin Lewis]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> Benjamin Lewis wrote:
>
>>>>>>
>>>>> There is something which leap out at me as soon a I saw this: the
>>>>> kind
>>>>> of person who _needs_ atime, knows how to set it. The majority of
>>>>> people
>>>>> - especially the home use - has little or no use for it whatsoever.
>>>> The majority of people will see a performance boost they will
>>>> appreciate regardless of whether they know about atime or not.
>>> But whether it is a noticeable difference or not will depend on the
>>> number of files they access, either with automated build procedures or
>>> GUI file managers that like to peek inside every file.  People who
>>> keep their directory trees sparse and don't venture out of their home
>>> directory in a GUI much will probably not know the difference except
>>> that tmpwatch may not clean up correctly and their mailer may have to
>>> do more work to decide if a message is unread (etc.).
>
>> In my experience, viewing a folder of images as thumbnails is
>> significantly slower with atime.
>
> Are you sure that your viewer didn't cache the thumbnail images on the
> first run so you were timing something different after changing the
> option?
>
I did clear the caches, yes.
>> Many users will be viewing folders of
>> images methinks. In addition, most GUIs read a large (read huge) number
>> of files when they load, so load times for the  GUI should be reduced
>> also.
>
> Some users will, some won't.  The atime change should be going though
> the disk write cache and thus only have a real-time hit when there is
> enough disk activity that the cache writes conflict with read operations.
>

-- 

Benjamin Lewis
Fedora Ambassador
ben.lewis at benl.co.uk

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"In cases of major discrepancy, it is always reality that got it wrong"
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