Messages in this thread | | | From | Albert Cahalan <> | Subject | Re: strange disk activity [tail -f] | Date | Wed, 3 Apr 1996 16:07:01 -0500 (EST) |
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> > I'm getting this sort of behaviour too. 1.3.80, there is disk activity > > every five or six seconds. procinfo says it's most often writing about > > three pages, but this varies. Under 1.2.13, on the same system, the > > closest I got to this was the minutely atrun. In both cases I have > > continuously running processes, including a top and three tail -fs. I > > suspect that the tails are what is causing this. > > yep, "tail -f" reads (polls) the file every second, this in turn changes > the atime field, and bdflush updates the inode and the superblock.
Aside from /tmp on a large system, I'd have to say that atime is rather useless. I'd be interested in a mount option to disable atime tracking. There might be a performance increase when doing reads, and it would help laptop users because disk activity reduces battery life.
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