Re: [RFC] Improved inode number allocation for HTree

[John Bradford]

> Though the journal only becomes involved when blocks are modified,
> unfortunately, because of atime updates, this includes all directory
> operations.  We could suggest to users that they should disable
> atime updating if they care about performance, but we ought to be
> able to do better than that.

On a separate note, since atime updates are not usually very important
anyway, why not have an option to cache atime updates for a long time,
or until either a write occurs anyway.  Holding a large number of
atime updates in a write cache is generally not going to be a major
issue - the worst case if a partition isn't cleanly unmounted is that
some atimes will be wrong.

John.