A few tweaks to a faster Fedora 12

[dkd903]

I compiled this list of tweaks that says using them will speed up your entire Fedora 12 experience: http://digitizor.com/2009/01/31/fedo...fedora-faster/

Please leave your comments and if possible suggest more tweaks so that I can list all of them too :-)

[tdaniel]

Hello,

The "noatime" mount parameter does not control how often the system updates the time but rather the file access times.

This affects files and dirrectories operations due to the unnecessary overhead created by the updating of the last access time of the file/dir.

Also, i think that a warning must be posted as well regarding the loss of file last access time functionality by implementing the "noatime" tweak.

Regards

[dkd903]

So, is it recommended to use the noatime parameter?

[tdaniel]

As detailed from the lkml discussion to which a reference is made in your article, the "noatime" parameter is a performance increaser.

It is correct to recommend it as performance tweak, i just pointed out that your explanation about what "noatime" does is misleading.

The "noatime" mount flag will instruct the kernel to NOT record file access times for the respective filesystem. In practice, file access times are recorded on the disk each time a file is read. This behavior induces a disk performance overhead especially when we're dealing with many small files.

On the other hand, file access times are used by some applications to figure out if the file has been read since the last time the application checked it.

The lkml mentions the mutt e-mail client that makes use of this capability.

Hope this explanation clears things up for you or anybody else reading this thread, if you have further questions don't be shy to ask them

[pankajp]

In the same lkml thread, it was mentioned that ubuntu had switched to noatime by default. Is there any idea if fedora already uses it or maybe using it by default in near future.

[tdaniel]

Both of my F12 installs, notebook and desktop, came without "noatime" set. I've set the mount flag by hand.

[RahulSundaram]

Hi,

Upstream kernel itself defaults to relatime these days. It was contributed by Ingo Molnar from Red Hat. Details at

http://lwn.net/Articles/244829/

[tdaniel]

According to : http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/...2/mount.2.html

The "relatime" flag is indeed used as a default since kernel version 2.6.30, this tweak may be considered obsolete.

The file "/proc/mounts" details the currently mounted volumes along with the mount flags used if someone wants to check if "relatime" is used on their system.

The "mount" command will not detail the defaults as i see it on my system:

[root@danielt-l ~]# cat /proc/mounts
rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0
/proc /proc proc rw,relatime 0 0
/sys /sys sysfs rw,relatime 0 0
udev /dev tmpfs rw,relatime,mode=755 0 0
/dev/pts /dev/pts devpts rw,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000 0 0
/dev/shm /dev/shm tmpfs rw,relatime 0 0
/dev/sda3 / ext4 rw,noatime,nodiratime,barrier=1,data=ordered 0 0
/proc/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb usbfs rw,relatime 0 0
/dev/sda1 /boot ext2 rw,noatime,nodiratime,errors=continue 0 0
/dev/sda2 /home ext3 rw,noatime,nodiratime,errors=continue,user_xattr,a cl,data=ordered 0 0
none /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw,relatime 0 0
none /proc/fs/vmblock/mountPoint vmblock rw,relatime 0 0

[root@danielt-l ~]# mount
/dev/sda3 on / type ext4 (rw,noatime,nodiratime)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noatime,nodiratime)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noatime,nodiratime)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,noatime,nodiratime)
/dev/sda1 on /boot type ext2 (rw,noatime,nodiratime)
/dev/sda2 on /home type ext3 (rw,noatime,nodiratime)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)
none on /proc/fs/vmblock/mountPoint type vmblock (rw)