[Novalug] ext4 vs. ext3 vs. ext2

James Ewing Cottrell 3rd JECottrell3@Comcast.NET
Mon Sep 7 18:56:57 EDT 2009


Aaron Porter wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 2:10 PM, Jon LaBadie<novalugml@jgcomp.com> wrote:
>> Does anyone know of an objective study of the value of noatime?
> 
> It would depend almost entirely on the application. For some workloads
> (dovecot imapd, firefox) it can be a huge win, for others (apache
> using sendfile) it can be miniscule -- though nodiratime may still be
> useful.

How is it a win? And why don't the mail clients just look the mtime?

I suppose that for some kind of application spool area it might be 
useful to know when a file was read. Megan Larko said that she used it 
to roll out unused files to some sort of external storage.

But what I have always found whenever i tried to use it that I would 
blow it, and point wc, or md5sum, or more or less, or rdist/rsync at the 
file(s) and lose that information just out of curiosity.

And I almost never cared when things were read.

As for mail, just set your client to check every so often or check 
manually. Either way some application (biff, and MUA) has to poll something.

JIM



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