I was using ext3, and after a botched kernel upgrade job, I wiped and tried ReiserFS. I notice a very big performance difference now. I think I have Mandrake set up exactly as it was before, but with the different FS. I'm pretty sure that the performance hit is due to ReiserFS. I have so many options for file systems when loading linux that I really don't have any idea what's best. Any opinions?

well i am going to link a few threads i just found by doing a simple search on the this site..
ext3 vs reiserfs poll & comments
someone claiming reiser is faster, plus others views
reiser vs ext2/ext3

and for what its worth here is a benchmark between ext3 and reiserfs that i found browsing around...
i only quickly briefed it, but by glimpsing at the charts it basically says that reiser is faster with bigger files and ext3 is faster with smaller files...
with that said you'll notice with some peoples comments in the above 3 links i gave, that they say reiser is now faster with smaller files...so you can be the judge of the info you read ;-)

oh and don't forget there are other filesystems that you may be interested in, and you can go to www.google.ca/linux to find some info about them, such as XFS, or JFS ...

When there's a big difference in performance it's rather not because of different filesystem. Filesystem can make your system slower/faster, but it's not so easy to realize. You probably fixed something.

I must have. It's a very dramatic difference. Mozilla just pops up w/ ext3. With ReiserFS my machine chugs for 4-5 seconds. There must be something other than file system. Thanks for the input.