Rudolf Kastl wrote:
turning off features that have design flaws in my eyes simply isnt a fix, but only a mere attempt to cure the symptom from a pure philosophical point of view. surely alot of more experienced users do use and enjoy those workarounds but at the end of the day we are crippling features instead of fixing issues. workarounds just slow down fixes though.
I agree with this...
Before we take a step like turning off atime, I think those who wish to do so need to provide good justification for it, well beyond "I heard it may go faster" or "it feels faster to me" - we need some good tests, some actual, measurable difference shown on various workloads, at a minimum.
The only hard numbers presented in the lkml thread (unless I missed some...) didn't actually show a *huge* difference IIRC.
I'd also suggest that we at least identify that if atime does have a measurable difference, whether this is true in general, or if this is somewhat more specific to a particular filesystem which could be fixed... etc.
IOW, if this change is made, I think it should be done with eyes wide open - what is the measurable advantage, under what workloads, for what filesystems, etc - as well as what the potential drawbacks are.
Thanks,
-Eric