3 ms·

I've always felt adding things like noatime or relatime was a bit too hacky. I'm not sure the actual consequences of access times not being properly recorded ar

I've always felt adding things like noatime or relatime was a bit too hacky. I'm not sure the actual consequences of access times not being properly recorded are well understood, and that scares me a lot; just exactly which software is actually affected (and how?). I don't use Mutt...but what about Samba? I have several folders shared in my LAN via Samba, with things like Access databases, Excel spreadsheets... could someone elaborate on this?

pflanze 11y ago
I've been using noatime forever (since 2002 or so) on my laptops/desktops and IIRC also all the servers that I set up myself, and a couple other servers I just checked have relatime (Debian default?), without any issue, although all of those machines only ran software of my choice and thus a relatively limited range. I even started somewhat relying on atime being the (otherwise non-existant at the time) "inode creation time" when using 'noatime', and was a bit upset when I realized that mounts created with "mount --bind" would lose the noatime setting (an explicit "mount -o remount,noatime" is required on the new mount point). I also used Samba around 2002, but am not sure whether I used noatime already with it.
joosters 11y ago
I've used it for years and never noticed a single problem. Mutt seems to be the only program that anyone ever mentions with an issue (it apparently uses the last access time to determine if a folder has received new mail since you last looked at it). Since I'm not a mutt user, I've no idea if anyone has bothered to fix this. IMO a file's last access time is inherently unreliable anyway, a file could have been read by a backup process or file indexer at any time. Your file browser might well peek at every file in a folder to make thumbnails or determine file types. You likely won't see any problems with Samba or with office documents, these all work fine with filesystems that don't have last access times at all (and Windows disabled last access times in Vista onwards, apparently)

pflanze 11y ago

I've been using noatime forever (since 2002 or so) on my laptops/desktops and IIRC also all the servers that I set up myself, and a couple other servers I just checked have relatime (Debian default?), without any issue, although all of those machines only ran software of my choice and thus a relatively limited range. I even started somewhat relying on atime being the (otherwise non-existant at the time) "inode creation time" when using 'noatime', and was a bit upset when I realized that mounts created with "mount --bind" would lose the noatime setting (an explicit "mount -o remount,noatime" is required on the new mount point). I also used Samba around 2002, but am not sure whether I used noatime already with it.

joosters 11y ago

I've used it for years and never noticed a single problem. Mutt seems to be the only program that anyone ever mentions with an issue (it apparently uses the last access time to determine if a folder has received new mail since you last looked at it). Since I'm not a mutt user, I've no idea if anyone has bothered to fix this. IMO a file's last access time is inherently unreliable anyway, a file could have been read by a backup process or file indexer at any time. Your file browser might well peek at every file in a folder to make thumbnails or determine file types. You likely won't see any problems with Samba or with office documents, these all work fine with filesystems that don't have last access times at all (and Windows disabled last access times in Vista onwards, apparently)