Comment by mg

3 years ago

Did they read and write all the data a filesystem handles?

Off the top of my head, the typical filesystem stores:

    - content
    - creation time
    - modification time
    - last access time
    - read/write/execute permissions
    - owner
    - group
    - position in the dir hirarchy

Turning off `atime` is about the first thing you do when you care about filesystem performance.

  • That advice is mostly obsolete, lazytime has been a thing for years.

    • Well, same point: keeping track of atime is way too expensive and barely useful.

      Lazytime is a pretty good hack, but it doesn't survive a crash, does it?

      2 replies →

  • Did this for a mdadm raid system using btrfs and the difference was very noticeable on a CI build machine.

Maybe not, but if all small files in a directory have the same structure, permissions, owner and same parent directory, and you don't care about x-times, you might as well use this context.