File systems -- reiser vs. ext3

[Al Davis <ad15@freeelectron.net>]

I am trying to understand them.

The basic question ...  Why choose one over the other?  Technically, what is 
different?

My benchmarks seem to show that Reiser is superior, but they may be flawed.  
What I see is that it is faster and uses space more efficiently. 

I get about a 4:1 difference for an md5sum of a large .iso file.  This was 
different partitions of the same drive.  Later, I copied all out of an ext3 
partition, reformatted it as reiser, and got the same 4:1 speedup.

I have been using Reiser for a few years without trouble.  (On the laptop 
since Suse first made it available as an option.) 

Does anyone know where I can find technical documentation on ext3?  Does 
anyone have any hard data (as opposed to anecdotal like mine) to show the 
relative merits?  (other than ext2 compatibility)

Tech documentation of Reiser is available on his web site.  I am looking for 
something comparable on ext3.