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Hint of the day: noatime and relatime in fstab

It’s been written about everywhere, but since we keep spotting installations in the wild where people don’t know about it, it probably deserves another mention.

By default, Linux uses the atime option on a disk mount, which means it writes a timestamp (e.g. a write to the drive) every time it reads anything. So in this case, reads cause writes – and also disk seeks, because a read from a file will then trigger having to write to the directory that contains the file. This even occurs if a file is read from the file system’s page cache (reading from the machine’s memory rather than the drive).

Unless you require an audit trail of users reading files, you generally you don’t want this. Thus, you want to add the noatime option to the disk mount in /etc/fstab. If you have just the defaults in there, you just make it defaults,noatime. It’ll doesn’t necesarily require a reboot as you can use umount/mount, but that gets tricky when dealing with the root filesystem so a reboot is generally easier. Setting these options is one of the first things we do when configuring a server.

Some user applications, such as Mutt (mail reader) do use the read access time. In that case, you can use the relatime option instead, which only writes a timestamp when a file or directory is written to. This is just for completeness of this story, as it’s still sub-optimal for a database server.

If you require read details for auditing (security) of the operating system, make sure all database-related files (database directories, InnoDB log files, binary logs, etc) are on a separate mount where you can use noatime.

Using noatime also makes a lot of sense on a web server, as it does a lot of reads. Remember, the fact that most files are in the filesystem cache doesn’t make a difference. As a general guide, it makes sense to set on most server installations. Quick win.

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