after I switched from from ext2 to ext3 i observed some severe performance degradation. Most discussion about this topic dealsTry increasing the journal size (mkfs -t ext3 -J size=20000) and see if that improves things.
with tuning of data-io performance. My problem however is related to metadata updates. When cloning (cp -al) or deleting directory trees I find, that about 7200 files are created/deleted per minute. Seems
this is related to some ex3 strategy, to wait for each metadata to be
written to disk. Interestingly this occurs with my new hw-raid
controller (3ware 9500S), which even has an battery buffered disk cache.
Thus there is no need for synchronous IO anyway. If I disable the
disk cache on my plain SATA disk using ext3, I also get this behavior.