On Thu, Mar 01, 2012 at 03:43:41PM +0100, Jacek Luczak wrote:

Yep, ext4 is close to my wife's closet.

Were all of the file systems freshly laid down, or was this an aged
ext4 file system?

Also you should beware that if you have a workload which is heavy
parallel I/O, with lots of random, read/write accesses to small files,
a benchmark using tar might not be representative of what you will see
in production --- different file systems have different strengths and
weaknesses --- and the fact that ext3/ext4's readdir() returns inodes
in a non-optimal order for stat(2) or unlink(2) or file copy in the
cold cache case may not matter as much as you think in a build server.
(i.e., the directories that do need to be searched will probably be
serviced out of the dentry cache, etc.)

Regards,

						- Ted