As we posted over 2 years ago, there’s a number of ways to speed up the general operations of a Linux (or Unix/Solaris/FreeBSD) system and one which we use & recommend a lot is to mount filesystems with the “noatime” and “nodiratime” flags.
noatime means that the kernel doesn’t do an additional write to the filesystem & disk everytime that you ask it to read a file and nodiratime stops the kernel doing a write to the disk when a directory is accessed. atime is “access time” and it can record the last time that a file was opened or read and using it means that you need to write to the disk every time you read anything from it. This can introduce what is often needless disk write activity to your system and given disk writes always take longer than disk reads, you end up greatly increasing the disk load & thus system latency of any VPS which doesn’t mount its filesytems with “noatime,nodiratime”.
You can mount your filesystems automatically (from reboot) with this option by setting the filesystem mount option of ‘noatime,nodiratime’ in the 4th parameter of each filesystem’s entry in the /etc/fstab file. eg: set that parameter to “defaults,noatime,nodiratime”.
Please feel free to contact us for assistance if you’d like help actioning this suggestion.
FYI & regards,
Richard.