Are there any issues with using noatime flag for mount points?

[MichaelRHMW]

Hi There,

Just wondering if there are any known issues with using the noatime flag for mounting via fstab?

Has anyone done this?
Did it provide any measurable benefit?
Did it cause any issues?

Thanks.

 

[cPanelAaronH]

Hello,

From a quick bit of research, this sounds like there is no major issue, only 'mutt' an email client that relied on atime.

Where is noatime safe to use?

I am trying to optimize my new fs layout, and I wondered, where is it safe to use noatime? I understand that e.g. mutt uses the access/creation/modify time, and whatever else may be using that, in

askubuntu.com

By the sounds of this, it is safe and can provide a good amount of improvement.

 

[MichaelRHMW]

Hi Aaron,

Thanks, I haven't been able to find much in the way of it working or not working in cPanel.
I did find an old thread, that never appeared to have gotten an answer, do you know if there are any issues caused by this flag (as per Any issues with mounting noatime? )

Thanks.

 

[cPanelAaronH]

Hey there,

Most people do not configure this since it is not the default. Our tuning guide filesystem linked below does recommend its use.

Filesystem Performance Tuning for EXT-4

Symptoms Your server may be experiencing high IOWait or disk Utilization. Sometimes you may also see that the filesystem journal is consuming a large amount of IO when using iotop to examine IO u...

support.cpanel.net

 

[ffeingol]

We have done this in the past on /tmp file systems (for example) as it aided some backup software that we used to use. No side effects other than it sped up the backup software.

 

[MichaelRHMW]

Thanks all, So far no issues.

 

[cPRex]

Glad to hear it's working well so far!