Re: [PATCH 00/23] per device dirty throttling -v8

Chuck Ebbert
2007-08-09T15:02:38Z

On 08/09/2007 02:25 AM, Lionel Elie Mamane wrote:
>
>> yeah, it's really ugly. But otherwise i've got no real complaint
>> about ext3 - with the obligatory qualification that
>> "noatime,nodiratime" in /etc/fstab is a must. This speeds up things
>> very visibly (...). So for most file workloads we give Windows a
>> 20%-30% performance edge, for almost nothing.
>
> It has been years since I used MS Windows much, but from my memories
> of my these days, I was under the impression that it (at least the NT
> line, the only surviving line these days) also maintained "last
> accessed" times. Except I only ever saw it at "right now" because the
> file explorer ... accesses the file before getting this metadata or
> something like that (when you right-click on a file and ask for its
> properties). It has creation and last modification time, too.
>

NT maintains atimes by default, at least up to XP. You have to edit the
registry to turn them off, and it is a single global switch -- not per
mountpoint like Unix.

And it makes a huge difference there, too.