Every time a file is read from your Linux ext3 partition it writes back a attribute to the file detailing the last access time. There are very few programs that actually use this to operate and it slows everything down.  Disabling “atime” and “diratime” on your Linux ext3 file systems can improve disk performance up to 40%!! Recommended to check this out…

Last time I talked about speeding up your Linux by tweaking your boot loader GRUB, BIOS, running services and servers or daemons and etc. Now it’s about Filesystem…

  1. Start a terminal.
  2. Switch to root using the “su -” command.
  3. Backup your fstab using the command: “cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.old”
  4. Open your /etc/fstab in the editor of your choice (nano, kate or gedit recommended, but I prefer vim, it’s the BEST recommendation from me!!). This can be done by issuing the command “nano /etc/fstab”, “kate /etc/fstab”, or “gedit /etc/fstab”, but do not forget also “vim /etc/fstab” :-)
  5. Locate the partitions that contain your / and /home file systems, as well as any other file system you want to optimize. Examples include /dev/hda2 and /dev/hda3, or /dev/sda2 and /dev/sda3.
  6. In the fourth section (just before the two numbers at the end of the line) you will see the options section of the fstab, e.g. “iocharset=utf8,nosuid” and etc..
  7. Enter “,noatime,nodiratime” after the existing options for each partition you wish to optimize.
    Save the fstab file.
  8. Reboot.

Enjoy your newly optimized Linux ext3 file system. And if you don’t believe it is 40% check out the website kerneltrap.org.

P.S.: Please notice that If you are using programs such as tmpwatch, mutt, or mail-notify this configuration change could cause those programs that make specific use of atime not to work.

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