Kernel developers squabble over Ext3 and Ext4

“The trigger for the discussion was a response from Jesper Krogh
to Torvalds’ announcement of kernel version 2.6.29, in which he
described massive delays in writing out the file system cache on
Ext3 file systems despite fast RAID arrays on computers with lots
of RAM.

“Ingo Molnar identified the maximum dirty ratio — the
proportion of memory which has to be written to the hard drive —
as a major part of the problem. The dirty ratio is still, according
to Molnar, five percent of the RAM, which, in the past, on systems
with, say, 1GB of RAM, didn’t really matter.”

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