Read an interesting discussion on the lkml list where Linus and friends talked about atime's performance impacts (http://kerneltrap.org/node/14148). Ingo phrased the problem best with:

' For every file that is read from the disk, lets do a ... write to
the disk! And, for every file that is already cached and which we
read from the cache ... do a write to the disk! '

Solutions are to mount your file systems with the noatime, nodiratime options. The only time this may cause a problem is if you have a local mail spool (the mailer will not know that new email arrived) or possibly with some backup software. The list mentions speed increases of up to 50% on build performance.

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