ReiserFS v3 + millions of files?

[Dan Oglesby <d.oglesby@insightbb.com>]

Greetings...

Long time ReiserFS user, first time I've had a problem.  Signed up for the 
mailing list last week, and was surprised to see so little traffic (might be 
a good thing?).

I'm running Red Hat 7.3 using a Red Hat 2.4.20 kernel.  The system has a 
RAID-5 array via 3Ware 7500 controller, and three Western Digital 120GB 
"Special Edition" hard drives.  The array is one filesystem, ReiserFS.  The 
operating system, swap, and other files are stored on a hard drive that is on 
the primary IDE controller off of the motherboard.

The system is a single board computer, with a P4 3.06 GHz hyperthreaded 
processor (kernel is SMP enabled), 512MB of RAM, and contains a mix of 
ReiserFS and EXT2 filesystems on the primary drive (ReiserFS only on the 
array).  No NFS.

The array is used to store what will basically amount to more than one million 
files with an average size of sixty kilobytes.

During simulations for file writes, I'm seeing write performance begin to drop 
dramatically after 800,000 files have been stored on the filesystem.

The filesystem is being mounted with the following options:  
defaults,notail,noatime,nodiratime

The filesystem was created with default options, basically a "mkreiserfs /dev/
sda1".

Is this behavior I should expect from ReiserFS v3?

This week I will be switching from a Red Hat kernel to a vanilla kernel (from 
kernel.org), first the latest 2.4 kernel, then the latest 2.6 kernel.  After 
that...  I dunno.

Help?

--Dan Oglesby