Linux

I use CentOS

I talked with this guy who seems to think loop mounting a fs ext3 image on a directory, as opposed to just using the underlying filesystem, will work better as far as IO conflicts. I have no idea why this would be better? I haven't been able to contact him.

Basically we have a daemon that creates a bunch of files on a directory, and constantly reads and writes to them. This has resulted in many io conflicts such that some reads and some writes are being blocked.

Why would a block device work better than a normal directory as far as IO conflicts are concerned?

What do you mean by 'io conflict'? Are you getting hangups where things are waiting for each other forever? I'm not convinced it would do anything to help locking problems like that, which may be fundamental to your application and not to the underlying FS.

A disk image like that would mean the entire filesystem wouldn't get fragmented by the very poor usage patterns you're subjecting it to, just the contents of the disk image.