I was just reading about that yesterday in the LinuxJournal weekly email
newsletter. From their email:

"Another useful option to put in /etc/fstab is "noatime", which prevents
access times from being updated when files on that partition are read.
Webmasters of busy servers use noatime on the partition where their document
root lives to get better performance. "

IMHO the best environment for the noatime option is for "safe" nonsystem
files, such as webpages or the like. Places where you OBVIOUSLY don't want
something like noatime to be set would be log files, etc.

My humble 0.02,
Lucas Vogel

P.S. my apologies to all for not making the meeting last night...

-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Bowley [mailto:johann@trod.org]
Sent: Friday, January 12, 2001 12:01 PM
To: plug-discuss@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us
Subject: atimes


Okay...  I know I've taught this in classes before when talking about
system tuning, but what are the side effects of turning off
atimes?  (using the noatime option when mounting a filesystem)

I've recently been playing around with it, and can't believe the
difference it makes!  Have you ever done a `find / --print` and NOT had
the hard drive sound like it's going to rattle out of the computer?

Now, back to my question, what are the side effects of disabling
atimes?  Are there any utilities that really need to know the last time a
file was accessed? (which would include the last time someone did
something like a `ls -l`)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=[The Realm of Darkness]=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= O-
 Ken Bowley                                        johann@trod.org
 AKA: Lord Johann                              http://www.trod.org
-=-=-=-=-=[ Linux, the choice of the GNU generation ]=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
LCP, LCI, and Brainbench Linux MVP


________________________________________________
See http://PLUG.phoenix.az.us/navigator-mail.shtml if your mail doesn't post
to the list quickly and you use Netscape to write mail.

Plug-discuss mailing list  -  Plug-discuss@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us
http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss