@ramsey The "significantly impact performance of servers under high load" is the thing where I believe you got other problems. Mostly when you got high load you are in a distributet setup where the underlying stream might not necessarily be a "real" filesystem so the minimal performamce gain will still cause network trafic with all the slowness that is tied to it.
But yeah. Investigating is cool and perhaps it can shave off a cPU cycle or two....
/cc @rasmus
@ramsey Also:
"Don't optimize for the machine that executes the code! Optimize for the person that maintains the code."
CPU cycles are cheap. As is storage.
/cc @rasmus