Poor VMWare performance on XFS 
I run a number of VM’s on my über-linux box at home and I decided to make use of XFS because itsa fast, reliable and modern file system. I also want to get some hands-on experience with it before OS X 10.6 ‘Snow Leopard’ comes out with it as its default filesystem.
Even though I’m running really fast Samsung Spinpoint F1 drives with 32MB cache I had experienced really slow VM disk performance.
Fast FS, Fast drives — hmmn. something isn’t right here.
I started by checking if Nvidia made special motherboard drivers for the NForce 780i that supported Linux x64 - no luck there.
The only thing I hadn’t used before was XFS. I Googled a bit and found this thread where someone else was having the same problem as me.
For a start, I enabled the ‘nobarrier’ option in my fstab and its suddenly a whole lot faster. I’ll try the other tweaks later on, but the performance is back to what I’d expected.
