This set of benchmarks finds that there’s no clear winner in
every category, but maintains that with the added value of
journaling thrown in, all provide a better “value” than ext2:
“First of all, there is no a clear winner, XFS is
better in some aspects or cases, ReiserFS in others, and both are
better than Ext2 in the sense that they are comparable in
performance (again, sometimes faster, sometimes slightly slower)
but they a journaling file systems, and you already know what are
their advantages… And perhaps the most important moral, is that
Linux buffer/cache is really impressive and affected, positively,
all the figures of my compilations, copies and random reads and
writes. So, I would say, buy memory and go journaled ASAP…
“