Is there a way (I’m on kde) to view files (hopefully in dolphin but I’ll take anything) by the date at which they were last accessed?
There does not appear to be. At least on KDE 4.3.5 there is no option to show a column for that time stamp that I can find.
Also some people (like me) mount filesystems with noatime which doesn’t update the atime stamp to improve performance. Atime was mentioned as a design flaw in Unix, each read of a file causing a write. Very few apps actually need atime. The overhead can be mitigated somewhat with relatime, and of course buffering helps.
Interesting. So if I turn off atime (I assume I can do this for the harddrive/basic opensuse system) would I notice a performance imporvement? Are there any issues from that?
It would depend on you usage pattern. If you run a database that may have many accesses per second It would make a difference. If you are only opening documents probably not.
Maybe View>Sort By>Date. Be sure to tick Descending as well. It worked for me.
That’s last created not last accessed.
On Thu, 01 Jul 2010 17:26:04 GMT
6tr6tr <> wrote:
>
> ken_yap;2183170 Wrote:
> > Also some people (like me) mount filesystems with noatime which
> > doesn’t update the atime stamp to improve performance. Atime was
> > mentioned as a design flaw in Unix, each read of a file causing a
> > write. Very few apps actually need atime. The overhead can be
> > mitigated somewhat with relatime, and of course buffering helps.
>
> Interesting. So if I turn off atime (I assume I can do this for the
> harddrive/basic opensuse system)
No, it is done for each individual mount point in the /etc/fstab file.
> would I notice a performance
> imporvement?
There are improvements, but not everybody notices them.
> Are there any issues from that?
The only program I know which uses this feature is “mutt”. But there
can be more: an administrator somewhere might need to know when a file
was last read before considering eliminating it or moving it to an
alternative (slower, longer term) storage.
An alternative to “noatime” is “relatime”, the impact is smaller if you
are worried. “man 8 mount” explains it:
relatime
Update inode access times relative to modify or change
time. Access time is only updated if the previous access time
was earlier than the current modify or change time. (Similar
to noatime, but doesn’t break mutt or other applications that
need to know if a file has been read since the last time it was
modified.)
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” GM (Minas Tirith))