System information
118 System Analysis and Tuning Guide
smbfs
Services needed to mount SMB/CIFS file systems from a Windows server.
splash / splash_early
Shows the splash screen on start-up.
9.3 File Systems and Disk Access
Hard disks are the slowest components in a computer system and therefore often the
cause for a bottleneck. Using the file system that best suits your workload helps to im-
prove performance. Using special mount options or prioritizing a process' I/O priority
are further means to speed up the system.
9.3.1 File Systems
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server ships with a number of different file systems, in-
cluding BrtFS, Ext3, Ext2, ReiserFS, and XFS. Each file system has its own advan-
tages and disadvantages. Please refer to Chapter1, Overview of File Systems in Linux
(↑Storage Administration Guide) for detailed information.
9.3.1.1 NFS
NFS (Version 3) tuning is covered in detail in the NFS Howto at http://
nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto/. The first thing to experiment with
when mounting NFS shares is increasing the read write blocksize to 32768 by using
the mount options wsize and rsize.
9.3.2 Disabling Access Time (atime)
Updates
Whenever a file is read on a Linux file system, its access time (atime) is updated. As a
result, each read-only file access in fact causes a write operation. On a journaling file
system two write operations are triggered since the journal will be updated, too. It is
recommended to turn this feature off when you do not need to keep track of access
times. This is possibly true for file and Web servers as well as for a network storage.