On Wed, Nov 05, 2003 at 11:08:47PM -0800, Mike Cheponis wrote:
> http://bsd.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/05/1536226&mode=thread&tid=122&tid=185&tid=190&threshold=-1:
> 
> 
>   `Research conducted at MIT [mit.edu] found BSD's filesystem implementation
>    to be "very poorly performing." [1]   Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack
>    has lagged behind, according to this study. [2]'
> 
> [1] http://web.mit.edu/tytso/www/linux/ext2intro.html

This is a very old article.
Basically ext2fs is FFS without fragments (just look at sys/ufs/ext2fs in
NetBSD sources). If I remember properly, the article was comparing
both filesystems in default config, which means ext2fs was async and
ffs semi-sync.
Also I think the system used to benchmark FFS didn't have R/W clustering
at this time.
And, last, at this time linux has his dynamic sized buffer cache, while
the system used to benchmark FFS still had the static fixed-size buffer
cache.
The difference in performances were related to both default settings,
and others differences in the operating system. The BSD has done lots of
progress since then :)

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
     NetBSD: 24 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--