Disclaimer The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.
If you are trying to squeeze additional performance out of your production servers you might look into adding the setting DisableSharedCacheChecking. This would be placed in your config.cfg file or under general configuration through the admin server. As always, it may help to perform some kind of analysis or metrics gathering prior to adding the configuration and then re-analyze after configuration implementation. What this boils down to is content server watching dynamic html resource includes in components to see if they need to be reloaded.
DisableSharedCacheChecking=true
In other words: if in place on a production server (where you would not be changing includes like you would a development instance) this setting can alleviate a measureable amount of file system activity. This should translate into a performance gain in some fashion. Or to say this as confusingly as possible: a reduction in performance degradation…I just thought that would be fun to say.
Potential flamebait warning: And as we all know, disks are slooowww. Maybe I just hook the disks up wrong? I hope I hooked the disks up...