[ale] Disk performance

[Jim Kinney]

Unless security issues require atime tracking, turn it off. Turn off auditd
process as well. It logs every file access an context switch and process
change.
On Aug 25, 2013 1:02 AM, "Brian Mathis" <brian.mathis+ale at betteradmin.com>
wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 24, 2013 at 8:13 PM, Alex Carver <agcarver+ale at acarver.net>wrote:
>
>> On 8/24/2013 18:03, Ed Cashin wrote:
>>
>>> On Sat, Aug 24, 2013 at 8:38 PM, Alex Carver <agcarver+ale at acarver.net>*
>>> *wrote:
>>> ...
>>>
>>>  Well, looks like mostly still working although it has a memory leak
>>>> somewhere.  The free memory (according to top) is slowly dropping.  It
>>>> went
>>>> from 380MB to 365MB in about two hours so 15MB went somewhere during
>>>> that
>>>> time.  Probably one of the cron jobs or apache, just don't know which
>>>> yet.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> If you haven't already, you might check whether that memory is simply
>>> being
>>> used to cache stuff.  Linux aggressively caches blocks from disk in pages
>>> of memory, which is usually a convenience.
>>>
>>
>> Good point, I'll look at that later and see what's up.  Although this has
>> led me to investigate one of my other machines (a P2) to check its drives.
>>  The drives are fine, they're just running a bit slow (20MB/s) though I'm
>> not too concerned since it's a low volume mail server (and certainly better
>> than the 200 KB/s I was getting on the troublesome machine).
>>
>>
>
> This wouldn't explain a sudden drop in performance, but make sure you have
> your partitions mounted using the "relatime" mount option.  One unfortunate
> problem with Linux is that it keeps track of every time a file is accessed,
> which means that every time you read a file, it causes a write back to the
> disk.
>
> Older kernels used the "noatime" option, but "relatime" is the modern
> incarnation of that.  The only caveat is if you are using backup software
> that relies on the access time, which I think is somewhat rare.  Using
> "relatime" should solve those problems though.
>
>
> ❧ Brian Mathis
>
>
>
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