Improve cPanel Server I/O

One of the biggest issues with web servers is I/O due to the fact hard drives are the slowest component of computers. On standard Linux servers each time a file is accessed the OS writes to the drive the time it was accessed. This sort of thing may come in handy in the odd case but for the most part on a standard cPanel server this is unnecessary writing to the hard drive. This can be turned off by setting noatime in /etc/fstab.

So I would recommend setting noatime on /home, /var, and /usr.

For example if you were going to turn off access time on /home you’d open /etc/fstab then find something like the following:

LABEL=/home /home ext3 defaults,usrquota 1 2

You want to switch this to be the following

LABEL=/home /home ext3 defaults,noatime,usrquota 1 2

And finally you want to remount /home so this command should do the trick

mount -o remount /home

You have now successfully improved the I/O of your server slightly when it comes to /home but do not hesitate to do this on your other partitions which are accessed quite frequently.