DB2 : What is DB2 disk IO performance benefit setting noatime in /etc/fstab Linux kernel

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This databases discussion was started by grofaty 0n 30 December 2008

I am using DB2 v9.5 FP2a on two different Linux distro Suse Linux 10 sp1 (IBM mainframe System z) and Ubuntu 8.10 (Intel Sytem x server).

I have been reading some articles that suggest to set Linux kernel parameter noatime in /etc/fstab to increase read performance. Linux kernel by default makes writes! to disk for every file it reads! just to update last access timestamp of file it was accessed. This produces way to many disk IO operations totally unnecessary.

There is article from IBM web page Tuning LAMP systems, Part 1: Understanding the LAMP architecture: “The first order of business is to ensure that atime logging is disabled on file systems. The atime is the last access time of a file, and each time a file is accessed, the underlying file system must record this timestamp. Because atime is rarely used by systems administrators, disabling it frees up some disk time. This is accomplished by adding the noatime option in the fourth column of /etc/fstab.”

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