Disk I/O as a bottleneck?

[is123 at zahav.net.il]

On Sun, 08 May 2011 10:02:18 +0300
geoffrey mendelson <geoffreymendelson at gmail.com> wrote:

> One of the bad things is that standard *NIX files systems are designed  
> with magnetic media in mind, they update the access time of files  
> every time you open them. This is bad for files that are opened often.

You can stop this with noatime in the fstab. It's something I do whenever I
set up a new install.

> The way around this is to mount a file system read only. Using a  
> compressed read only file system, such as that on a "live" CD works  
> well in this case. The problem with it is that you can't
> add software or change settings.

You don't need to mount the fs r/o to use noatime.