I have evaluated Fusion-io ioDrive duo (PCIe direct attached NAND
flash memory storage) on the CentOS 5.4.
The experimental result shows the write performance with multiple
jobs (processes) on the ext3/ext4 filesystems is lower than that of XFS.
The question I have is what is the cause of the ext3/ext4 performance
limitation.
I have measured the random write performance on several filesystems
using fio benchmark (http://freshmeat.net/projects/fio/).
My PC box has dual Intel Xeon W5590 3.33 GHz (8 cores), 48 GB memory,
and Fusion-io ioDriveDuo (320 GB SLC).
The XFS performance grows as the number of jobs increases. On the
other hands, the ext3/ext4 do not.
In the both cases, I mount filesystems with the "noatime" option only.