recommend turning off atime on your filesystem (setting noatime).
Done it on both Solaris and Linux boxes, had no problems with either. Didn't benchmark it, but the servers were really struggling IO-wise at the time and the change had a noticeable improvement.
Like anything it depends where your bottlenecks are - if you've got 15K RPM SCSI disks connected to decent SCSI RAID cards slotted onto a 64bit PCI bus - and your setup only accesses 3 different files, you won't see any/much of an improvement. If you've got a software RAID on some old IDE disks and a directory tree of a couple of million files then you'll wonder how you managed without.
Our current production servers don't have it switched on - we've not noticed any particular issue IO-wise. Might try it and see if it makes a difference.
Carl
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