Unfortunately these numbers don't really mean much. Aside from what else is happening on the machines, in some cases note that writing was showing up faster th

Unfortunately these numbers don't really mean much. Aside from what else is happening on the machines, in some cases note that writing was showing up faster than reading, which really means that it's just writing things to disk buffers. For this test to have been meaningful there should have been an fsync at the end of the run. The direct-i/o measurements should be closer to apples-to-apples. When I'm doing I/O benchmarking I start every run with a clean reboot and follow an exact set of steps from bootup to start of the benchmark. It's almost impossible to simulate that on a VPS.