It’s been written about everywhere, but since we keep spotting installations in the wild where people don’t know about it, it probably deserves another mention.

By default, Linux uses the atime option on a disk mount, which means it writes a timestamp (e.g. a write to the drive) every time it reads anything. So in this case, reads cause writes – and also disk seeks, because a read from a file will then trigger having to write to the directory that contains the file. This even occurs if a file is read from the file system’s page cache (reading from the machine’s memory rather than the drive).

Unless you require an audit trail of users reading files, you generally you don’t want this. Thus, you want to add the noatime option to the disk mount in /etc/fstab. If you have just the defaults in there, you just make it defaults,noatime. It’ll doesn’t necesarily require a reboot as you …

MariaDB and MySQL performance boost using noatime. Take a peek at your filesystem mount file on your Linux Box /etc/fstab

/dev/VolGroup01/LogVol01 /data ext3 defaults 0 0

In many cases just like the above you'll see that MySQL data location is mounted with "defaults" options - in our case MySQL data files are located in /data partition.

What does it mean? It means that you are taking a performance hit every time the file is accessed (read or write) on your file system. There is a record created i.e. physically written to the file system, that is besides MySQL access.

The issue is that if you do not explicitly specify "noatime" mount option for your ext3 file system the default "atime" will be used. This option is constantly writing to the disk bogging down your io performance. Unless you have a specific need for "atime" you are wasting io resources especially if you are using database …