About Web Development by Activo » nodiratime http://www.activoinc.com/blog Web Development in a Web 2.0 World Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:16:07 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 Setting noatime and nodiratime for improved disk performance http://www.activoinc.com/blog/2009/08/25/setting-noatime-and-nodiratime-for-improved-disk-performance/ http://www.activoinc.com/blog/2009/08/25/setting-noatime-and-nodiratime-for-improved-disk-performance/#comments Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:00:46 +0000 Ron Peled http://www.activoinc.com/blog/?p=305 This is great if you have a server that performs plenty of disk access operations and you are interested in speeding things up a bit. Here is how to do this in three steps. First some assumptions:

  • You have root access
  • You are the only one that will ever need to mount or unmount this file system
  • Running CentOS (this may work, but was not tested on any other linux server)

This is what we are doing:

  1. Editing /etc/fstab to set the noatime and nodiratime flags for the file system
  2. Remounting the drives/file systems (without rebooting)
  3. Checking our work

Step 1: Edit the /etc/fstab, type:

vi /etc/fstab

Add the noatime, nodiratime flags right after the defaults flag in the “/” root mount partition. Repeat to all the partitions that you wish to speed up. Here is how my fstab file looks like after the change (click to enlarge):

etc-fstab-in-vi_with_noatime_nodiratimeStep 2: Remount the file system:

mount -oremount /

Step 3: Check our work:

cat /proc/mounts

Tip: the following command will perform a tiny benchmark test, in case you want to see how fast your hard drives perform. If you want to compare, you should perform a before and after tests.

hdparm -tT /dev/sda

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