Improving File System Performance

Accessing the disk is an expensive operation in terms of resources and is one of the slowing factors for any server. If you can cut the number of times Apache or the operating system need to read from disk or write to disk, performance can be improved significantly. The following sections discuss some of the parameters you can fine tune to achieve this. In addition, most modern operating systems are very efficient with filesystem caching, and thus ensuring that enough RAM is available can also dramatically improve file access speed for commonly accessed files.

Mounting File Systems with noatime Option

Many Linux file systems can be mounted with the noatime option. This means that the operating system will not record the last time a file was accessed when reading it, though it will still keep track of the last time it was written to. This can provide significant speed improvements, especially in heavily loaded servers. The following line shows a sample /etc/fstab enTRy:

/dev/hda3    /www    ext2   defaults,noatime    1  1