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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-1869?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12628068#action_12628068
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Allen Wittenauer commented on HADOOP-1869:
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I think Konstantin's point is that the only "realistic" use case we can come up 
with for setting an arbitrary access time is during a file create (such as 
expansion of an archive and a distcp), therefore the API should reflect that 
use case since it keeps the number of routines small.  Please correct me if I'm 
wrong.

To me, that sounds incredibly unclean.  It would better to allow for a separate 
utimes()-equivalent API so that a) if there is a use case later, it can be 
covered and b) do we really want a call that is two operations-in-one?



> access times of HDFS files
> --------------------------
>
>                 Key: HADOOP-1869
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-1869
>             Project: Hadoop Core
>          Issue Type: New Feature
>          Components: dfs
>            Reporter: dhruba borthakur
>            Assignee: dhruba borthakur
>             Fix For: 0.19.0
>
>         Attachments: accessTime1.patch, accessTime4.patch, accessTime5.patch
>
>
> HDFS should support some type of statistics that allows an administrator to 
> determine when a file was last accessed. 
> Since HDFS does not have quotas yet, it is likely that users keep on 
> accumulating files in their home directories without much regard to the 
> amount of space they are occupying. This causes memory-related problems with 
> the namenode.
> Access times are costly to maintain. AFS does not maintain access times. I 
> thind DCE-DFS does maintain access times with a coarse granularity.
> One proposal for HDFS would be to implement something like an "access bit". 
> 1. This access-bit is set when a file is accessed. If the access bit is 
> already set, then this call does not result in a transaction.
> 2. A FileSystem.clearAccessBits() indicates that the access bits of all files 
> need to be cleared.
> An administrator can effectively use the above mechanism (maybe a daily cron 
> job) to determine files that are recently used.

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