Filesystems

Learn how mount options such as noatime and relatime affect Kafka performance.

Linux records when a file was created (ctime), modified (mtime) and accessed (atime). The value noatime is a special mount option for filesystems (such as EXT4) in Linux that tells the kernel not to update inode information every time a file is accessed (that is, when it was last read). Using this option can result in write performance gain. Kafka is not relying on atime. The value relatime is another mounting option that optimizes how atime is persisted. Access time is only updated if the previous atime was earlier than the current modified time.

To view mounting options, run mount -l or cat /etc/fstab command.