[Samba] Avoiding constant HDD access

[Jeremy Allison]

On Fri, Nov 09, 2018 at 04:54:59AM +0300, Albert Berger via samba wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 08, 2018 at 07:18:40PM +0000, Rowland Penny via samba wrote:
> > That is what I thought.
> >  
> > I have had 'pidstat' running on a Unix domain member, Samba
> > 4.6.15-Debian, for quite sometime and I got two lines like this:
> > 
> > 15:13:57        0      3571     -1.00     -1.00     -1.00
> > 1  /usr/sbin/winbindd 
> > 
> > and this twice:
> > 
> > 11:38:17    10000     27033     -1.00     -1.00     -1.00
> > 108  /usr/sbin/smbd -D
> > 
> > Start time: 10:10:37
> > End time:   18:47:37
> > 
> > I have also run 'pidstat' on a Raspberrypi, Samba 4.5.12-Debian
> > and got similar lines to the above, just slightly more often, but no
> > where near as often as the OP.
> > 
> > If it helps, I can set up a standalone server on the rpi tomorrow and
> > see what I get.
> > 
> > Rowland
> 
> I wonder does enabling updating file access times during mounting the
> file system have something to do with this case? If updating access times
> is enabled (as in my case) then even file reading operations will be
> causing HDD writes: inodes will be updated with new file access
> times. I wrote about this in my previous message, but it went
> unnoticed.

What ! You're not mounting with noatime or relatime ? That's
*crazy*, and will cause many writes that are unneeded.

Don't do that ! Why would you do that ?