I just found a piece of paper with a “magic incantation” on it: a set of parameters for mkfs.xfs and mount that make Linux XFS go fast.. I remember spending a few days reading various documents and experimenting time after time to arrive at this, but unfortunately all that knowledge and pretty numbers are now lost.
Still, the effect is here, and that’s what counts, isn’t it?
mkfs.xfs -l size=128m,version=2 -d agsize=4g mount -o inode64,largeio,logbufs=8,logbsize=256k,noatime,nodiratime
Edit: I just caught a typo in the above: logbsize option was specified wrong.