Ingo Molnar wrote:
* Theodore Tso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
If you are always reading from the same small set of files (i.e., a
database workload), then those inodes only get updated every 5 seconds
(the traditional/default metadata update sync time, as well as the
default ext3 journal update time), it's no big deal. Or if you are
running a mail server, most of the time the mail queue files are
getting updated anyway as you process them, and usually the mail is
delivered before 5 seconds is up anyway.
So earlier, when Ingo characterized it as, "whenever you read from a
file, even one in memory cache.... do a write!", it's probably a bit
unfair. Traditional Unix systems simply had very different workload
characteristics than many modern dekstop systems today.
yeah, i didnt mean to say that it is _always_ a big issue, but "only a
small number of files are read" is a very, very small minority of even
the database server world.
OTOH, consider a popular Linux task, web serving. atime results in a
lot of unnecessary disk traffic.
Jeff
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