Turning off atime is a small but effective way to improve system performance. Here’s what it is and why it matters.
Whenever I upgrade Linux on my home computer, I have a list of tasks I usually do. They’ve become habits over the years: I back up my files, wipe the system, reinstall from scratch, restore my files, then reinstall my favorite extra applications. I also make a few system tweaks. I’ve been making some of these tweaks for so long that I recently wondered if I still needed to do them.

One tweak is atime, which is one of the three timestamps on every file on Linux (more on that later). Specifically, I wondered if it’s still worth it to disable atime in more recent Linux systems. Since atime is updated every time the file is accessed, my understanding was that it had a significant impact on system performance.

I recently upgraded my computer to Fedora 32 and turned off atime on my upgraded system out of habit. But did I still need to? I decided to look into it further. Here’s what I found.

#linux