Re: Ext2 speedup (No atime update)

Erik Corry (erik@kroete2.freinet.de)
Mon, 3 Jun 96 00:39 MET DST


Ingo Molnar (mingo@teto.sch.bme.hu) wrote:
:
: On Sun, 2 Jun 1996 coneill@premier.net wrote:
:
: > The basic idea behind this is that for some applications, there is litle
: > or no point in updating the access time on the file. My primary use for
:
: well one such little point is POSIX conformance

Yes, the default should remain to update the atime, but there may
well be people who don't mind losing a little POSIX conformance in
return for better performance. Me for example.

This patch could also be useful for people who spin down their disk
drives after a certain period of inactivity. At the moment the
disk gets spun up again to write the atime every time some daemon
(like cron) wakes up and reads a file that was in the cache anyway.
So it will probably be popular with laptop owners.

I'll be using this patch, and I hope it makes it into 2.1.

-- 
Erik Corry ehcorry@inet.uni-c.dk http://inet.uni-c.dk/~ehcorry/  +45 86166287