[kilburn]

> but without the overhead

The cost of atime is an extra write every time you read something.

Relatime changes this to one atime update per day (by default), low enough that it usually doesn't matter.

However, that update per day may have significant impact when you are using Copy-on-Write filesystems (btrfs, zfs). Each time the atime field is updated you are creating a new metadata block for that file. Old blocks can be reclaimed by the garbage collector (at an extra cost), but not if they exist in some snapshot.

All of this means that if you use btrfs/zfs and have lots of small files and take snapshots at least once per day, there's a noticeable performance difference between relative and noatime.

I've been using noatime everywhere for several years and I've never noticed any downside. This is definitely my recommended solution.

[xorcist]

If you don't use atime, there's no need to keep it around. Daily or otherwise. Unless you have reason to believe an application uses atime, it probably doesn't.

I've used noatime by default, except for few cases where I know it is used, in professional settings for probably two decades. Hopefully you know what kind of appliciation you are running. There are many parameters in a system and this is just one of them.

The only times I've seen atime used has been for a two queues, and only in the case of "has this file changes since last it was read". And that is precisely what relatime is for, the daily update is just an optional extra.