Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
I make it a habit of eating my own words if I screw up. If the results seen on Ubuntu by one test hold up, it might have a large increase in large writes (but nothing in large reads).
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_ext4&num=1
Right, so - Ext4 faster than Ext2? Not surprising. The on-disk format has changed. There's less fragmentation. There are all sorts of clever things included in the new FS. So, yes, it does more work with the disk, but in a much more intelligent way.
I like the stability of Ext3, but in terms of speed it's not the sharpest lightbulb in the toolshed. And after many years of using Linux, I'm not even buying the myth that "Linux doesn't need a FS defragmenter." That's just not true. It does get fragmented, and due to that it does get slower.
Ext4 is a welcome improvement. The upcoming btrfs perhaps even more so.