If you got better performance from an RDBMS than from a fileystem, something was set up wrong on that machine. Or it was running an OS with a lame filesystem.

Both. It was running Windows (and that is badly set up by definition) and the filesystem in question was samba, which used a linux box that in turn got its data through NFS. I hate seeing such configurations without being allowed to fix it.

Juerd # { site => 'juerd.nl', plp_site => 'plp.juerd.nl', do_not_use => 'spamtrap' }