Increase Drive Performance by 40% using noatime
Are you feeling the heat on your dedicated server, getting high I/O wait times?
If you are using EXT3 partitions then it is worth checking to see if they are mounted using ‘noatime’. If they are not, then every read to your partition is also a write which can massively reduce hard drive performance.
First, find all partitions mounted as EXT3 mount without noatime:
# mount | grep ext3
/dev/sda1 on / type ext3 (rw,noatime) /dev/sdb1 on /backup type ext3 (rw)
Any not showing the noatime attribute, simply remount like so:
# mount -o remount,noatime /backup
You can do this without a server reboot, you can do this with the server live and with the partitions already mounted.