I’ve always been concerned about the potential performance impact of a system confgured to use LVM. Reports on the internet have been conflicting, with some people reporting a significant loss of performance while others report no difference, or even a s light improvement, in performance. LVM adds a level of manageability and flexibility to partitioning that is welcome to most system administrators. However one must also be concerned with the performance of a filesystem, especially on servers where the filesystems are the bottleneck. To satisfy my curiosity I decided to run some benchmarks and see what the performance delta between a system with LVM and one without would be.