[11] Reiser4 uses B*-trees in conjunction with the dancing tree balancing approach, in which underpopulated nodes will not be merged until a flush to disk except under memory pressure or when a transaction completes.
As of 2004[update], synthetic benchmarks performed by Namesys in 2003 show that Reiser4 is 10 to 15 times faster than its most serious competitor ext3 working on files smaller than 1 KiB.
[13] Benchmarks conducted in 2013 with Linux Kernel version 3.10 show that Reiser4 is considerably faster in various tests compared to in-kernel filesystems ext4, btrfs and XFS.
In order to afford increasing legal fees, Hans Reiser announced on December 21, 2006, that he was going to sell Namesys;[18] as of March 26, 2008, it had not been sold, although the website was unavailable.
[3] In 2015, Michael Larabel mentioned it is unlikely to happen without corporate backing,[26] and then he suggested in April 2019 that the main obstacle could be the renaming of Reiser4 to avoid reference to the initial author who was convicted of murder.