On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 05:55:45PM +1000, Barry Naujok wrote:

Not quite sure if this is the right test, but I did 1000 creates on
a brand new filesystem with and without ci on my SATA drive, both
sustained almost 600 creates per second.

I believe creates would be the worst case scenario for not adding
negative dentries?

No, negative dentries shouldn't have any effect on that.  negative
entries help to optimize away lookups.  E.g. thing of the PATH variable
and say your shell is not in the first directory listed there.  Having
a negative dentry for it means that you don't have to do a lookup in
the first directories everytime someone wants to use the shell.