I talked with this guy who seems to think loop mounting a fs ext3 image on a directory, as opposed to just using the underlying filesystem, will work better as far as IO conflicts. I have no idea why this would be better? I haven't been able to contact him.
Basically we have a daemon that creates a bunch of files on a directory, and constantly reads and writes to them. This has resulted in many io conflicts such that some reads and some writes are being blocked.
Why would a block device work better than a normal directory as far as IO conflicts are concerned?