Hi Kirk,
say...did you try JFS?
Yes I did. However that was while playing with the centosplus kernel and before I realized that I needed to run the stock kernel in order to have access to a set of kernel modules that are available in RPM form only for the stock kernel.
Along the way I managed to delete my JFS benchmarks. I guess I didn't post the actual numbers to the list but JFS performed a bit worse than XFS but still much better than ext3.
So JFS performance still stands. Thank you.