Comment 66 for bug 131094

Miguel Rodríguez wrote:
> It may not be related, but we were having speed issues with tracker in
> some computers here, and it was fixed after adding the relatime mount
> option to ext3 indexed partitions.

Back when I first tried it, I added noatime (before I knew about
relatime), and it did indeed help a lot.

Without noatime, the disk seeked heavily and the disk I/O activity
(according to the Gnome System Monitor applet) was always high while
indexing.

With noatime, the disk seeked a lot less, and the disk I/O activity
appeared to be nearly zero.

When I saw such a dramatic change, I thought that would mean the
problems affecting destkop application performance would be fixed.

However, despite the lack of much accounted-for I/O, and less noise
from the disk, for some reason all applications still ran really
slowly.

So, yes: noatime/relatime makes a good and essential different on ext3
partitions, and probably others. On latest kernels and newer
Trackers, O_NOATIME is I think, so you don't need those mount options.
(But relatime is generally a good choice anyway).

But: it's not enough by itself, at least on some of our systems.

-- Jamie