Martin, Actually I have done some more testing and discovered that when index merging no physical reads were done (they are all cache hits) so ext3 problem is handling a ton of small writes which it does very badly according to google (it fragments destroying performance and preventing contiguous writing to the index)
XFS in contrast does these very well with a lot of contiguous writing which results in almost no loss of speed thanks to its delayed allocation feature (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_allocation) which tracker benefits from. the good news is that this feature is under consideration for ext4 - https://ols2006.108.redhat.com/2007/Reprints/sato-Reprint.pdf so fingers crossed! -- Heavy Disk I/O harms desktop responsiveness https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/131094 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is the bug contact for Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
