Robert Moskowitz wrote:
I'm sure there are other things as well but first thing comes to mind is disabling atime for your file systems, to test the change you can do this
(for each of the mount points) mount <mount point> -o remount,noatime
Everything is quite on the notebook front. Now.
But What is going on here?
It's an old Ext2/3 feature that updates the atime information every time a file is accessed, even when the file is just being read from, not written to, thereby transforming even read-only disk operations to read-write. It's useless in pretty much every situation, except if you need to do disk forensics (there's a break in and you need to figure out everything that the attacker did to your system).
There were talks on LKML a while ago to change the default from atime to noatime. I don't know what was the result of that.
Bottom line: disable atime on all systems unless you _really_ need to do disk forensics. You will see a performance improvement in almost every scenario.