Robert Moskowitz wrote:
But What is going on here?
atime -- Update inode access time for each access. This is the default.
noatime -- Do not update inode access times on this file system (e.g, for faster access on the news spool to speed up news servers).
Are the inodes being updated or some info about inode access times?
Every time a file is accessed the file system updates an internal table noting the last time it was accessed. Used for tools like find. Most people don't ever use this data themselves directly.
If you have a partition for a mail share, would this help it too (like it does for a news server)?
It should, though there are some apps that don't behave properly without atime being updated. I don't recall any off the top of my head but recall discussions over the years where people have mentioned some. Maybe they are mostly fixed now, I'm sure a google search will turn up results.
This looks informative: http://kerneltrap.org/node/14148
nate