Comment 4 for bug 1530167

This issue may cause other problems if resolved in a straightforward manner just by moving acct file from tmpfs to an HDD — on systems with high process churn rate writing acct file causes high i/o usage. I have observed systems on which it caused production degradation; however the problems were caused by spawning thousands of processes each minute.

Another option is disabling acct mechanism — if you assign ATOPACCT environment variable to something like /dev/null, atop will run with accounting disabled ("no procacct" mode). It will still be able to collect valuable statistics; only events that happen either too fast or totally inside the sampling interval could possibly be dropped.

We should consider how much data would flow through acct interface (and written to the acct file if enabled).