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. -- Florin Andrei http://florin.myip.org/