atimes

What do you use atimes for? Besides telling the last time something
noticed that a file was there? I can understand the need for ctime and
mtime, but I just can't think of a real use for atime due to the number of
things that can update it.

On Fri, 12 Jan 2001, Lucas Vogel wrote:

> 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...