Before we get too involved in speculating, shouldn't we actually measure the
performance of 7.1 on XFS and Reiserfs? Since it's easy to disable fsync,
we can test whether that's the problem. I don't think that logging file
systems must intrinsically give bad performance on fsync since they only log
metadata changes.
I don't have a machine with XFS installed and it will be at least a week
before I could get around to a build. Any volunteers?
Ken Hirsch