Note the result that the effect on time is more dramatic than the effect on space. In this benchmark, when creating a file I determine which order of magnitude its size will fall in, with one file in five being promoted into a higher size class than the base size, and in one in five of those being promoted to the next size, etc. The size of an individual file is randomly distributed within the size range of its category.
Most bytes belong to the larger sizes, most files belong to the smaller sizes.
Note that the literature has not yet produced a statistical distribution function for file sizes, though there are many differing statistics available on the net. I wish to note that the use of a file set containing files in the 0-100 byte range is in no way fair to ext2fs, which like most file systems was not specially designed for files below 1k, though its architecture is better than most file systems would be for such a file set due to its synchronization policy. I use 16000 files with sizes in the table below. Note that at 16000 files in one directory, ext2 is exceeding its design intent, and it takes long enough to perform directory insertions that it is not truly usable, and for this reason larger benchmarks were not performed. Ratios were calculated using measured numbers with more precision than those shown in the tables.