The advice everyone repeats without checking it Every “speed up your Linux install” guide tells you to slap noatime on every mount in /etc/fstab and call it a day. It’s not wrong exactly, but it’s not universally the win people treat it as either, and blindly copying it cost me nothing to try but also gave me nothing to gain on one of my own filesystems, for a reason worth actually understanding. ...
Why this even matters Every block device on Linux has an I/O scheduler sitting between your applications and the actual disk, deciding the order requests get sent in. Get the wrong one for your workload and you’re leaving real performance on the table, or worse, adding latency you didn’t need to. Check what’s currently active and what else is available: cat /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler The one in brackets is active. On modern kernels you’ll usually see some combination of none, mq-deadline, kyber, and bfq listed. ...