  We consider the effect of noise on the dynamics generated by
volume-preserving maps on a d-dimensional torus. The quantity we use to measure
the irreversibility of the dynamics is the dissipation time. We focus on the
asymptotic behaviour of this time in the limit of small noise. We derive
universal lower and upper bounds for the dissipation time in terms of various
properties of the map and its associated propagators: spectral properties,
local expansivity, and global mixing properties. We show that the dissipation
is slow for a general class of non-weakly-mixing maps; on the opposite, it is
fast for a large class of exponentially mixing systems which include uniformly
expanding maps and Anosov diffeomorphisms.
