Read the damn article. It explains how it's localtime (the function you need to format time in user's time zone) that makes the stat call - to check if the ocnfigured time zone changed.
> Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article
I read the article. Yes, localtime requires the call; that wasn't my point. My point was that for plenty of common, server-side code, either this isn't required, or is inconsequential.
The former case that I was consider is the formatting of timestamps into TZs in the context of a request being server by a server. Most server-side TZ conversions I've ever needed can't call localtime, b/c localtime is wired to not the user's timezone, but the TZ of the machine the server's code is running on, which is typically either nonsense, UTC, or whatever the devs like. Server side code needs (of course, YMMV) to use the user's TZ, whatever that may be, so I'm making calls to a library built for that, e.g., pytz, which doesn't need to stat() that the machines TZ as there is no point to doing so.
The other instances the author lists that do require localtime are instances where localtime's stat call is the least of your worries, as you're about to perform other operations that are much more expensive.
Timezones don't exclusively belong to users... Most syslogs (up until systemd) are configured to write out logs in machine localized time. Same goes for web servers. Really, there are a ton of cases where servers need to consider their timezone. I don't much like it, but it nevertheless is true.
You have been using poor logging softwares. For the past decade and a half (or more) some of us have been using logging softwares that write out logs without converting timestamps to a local format or a local time, relying rather upon log post-processing tools to convert them to different (sometimes multiple) timezones of our choosing and at whim when we want to read our logs. Our servers haven't needed to consider timezones for all of those years, and our log-writing softwares don't call a localtime() function of any stripe. Please do not tar us with your brush.
I haven't been using them I hate the whole approach and defer any rendering of timestamps in logs. I'm just pointing out that it is very commonplace. Set up any distro's server distribution with the default settings and then track how often the localtime file gets touched...
