[nylug-talk] [Bulk] Re: ext3 and noatime

[Sunny Dubey]

On Monday 04 February 2008 07:53:31 am Miguel Gonzalez Castaños wrote:
> How can I know the defaults that apply in Debian? I've checked man pages
> and I don't see noatime as defaults...Neither in the fstab...

If you're asking what the "defaults" option in Debian means, check your 
distro's corresponding mount man page and look up the "defaults" option.

As for debian not using noatime ... as dumb as it sounds, the logic behind 
such a decision makes sense.  For the most part some distros are far more 
concerned with universal compatibility than they are with simple performance 
tweaks.  Doing such also reduces the number of bugs that crop up.  (Hence 
many developer's hate for the 50 bazillion tweaks Gentoo users use all at 
once.)  Additionally there is always the unix mentality of "do not restrict a 
user, but do not enable by default" which pretty much states that if a user 
cares about something like performance or an application he/she will have to 
RTFM and enable it on their own.

In this particular case of noatime however ... I have to admit enabling 
noatime seems incredibly utilitarian.  I think that any application relying 
on atime for anything relevant is broken by default and needs to learn about 
inotify or some FAM-like program.  This is especially true today with CRON 
jobs that transverse entire file systems and the newfangled desktop search 
apps like Tenor and Beagle that read many different files in order to 
increase their searching cache.

-- 
Sunny Dubey

  mail:  sunny at audiowiki.org
  tele:  212.333.3542