First impressions of ext4 with large file deletion

I've been using ext3 for a long time on my CentOS servers, but ext3 has one big flaw that has constantly affected me.  It takes forever and a day in order to delete large files.

On my home server, I have a very large array where I put raw video files prior to conversion into compressed/lossy formats.  This works well, but then when I go to clean off the multi-gigabyte raw files it will take 5-10 minutes to delete a few dozen gigabytes of data.  So I've been putting up with for a long time this way.

Fast forward to 2010, and ext4 is finally close to production ready in CentOS 5.5.  (It may even already be marked as production-ready...)  I switched that scratch space over to ext4 last week and it's performing admirably.  Much better performance when deleting large multi-gigabyte files.  Which helps the system not feel so slow while it's doing that delete.

I probably won't use ext4 for my primary volumes quite yet.  I still plan on leaving /home, / (root), /var, /boot as ext3 (ext2 for /boot), but I will probably put the larger user data file systems as ext4 from now on.  It's enough of a step forward to be worth it (and ext4 is pretty stable now).