On CentOS 5.0, a had the same benchmarks and now, EXT3 and XFS seems to had better or equivalent performance on Read and Create Random files. One of this tests, using bonnie++, show this:
# bonnie++ -d /mnt/sdc1/testfile -s 8192 -m `hostname` -n 50:150000:5000:1000
bonnie++? Not appropriate. Try this: http://untroubled.org/benchmarking/2004-04/
And add JFS to the mix. You will be surprised.
I already done tests with fsbench and the results on CentOS 4.5 were equivalent: the performance of XFS was much higher than EXT3.
Then, i retest using fsbench, bonnie++ and iozone on CentOS 5.0, and the results now show the EXT3 (dir_index, noatime) with performance similar to XFS.
Say....how do the numbers on Centos 5 compare with Centos 4.5? Did XFS loose performance?