I will know better when the load ramps up next week but 2.4.4 (with Al
Viro's prune_icache() patch) just seems to "feel" better than the previous
2.4 kernels did. This is a UP Pentium-III with 256MB RAM used as a web
server with about 100 connections open as I write this and serving about 50
requests/sec.
Note this machine does not run X or have any users logged in, it is just a
plain old web server (Debian Woody and Apache).
Now that I have said this it will likely turn into a smoking heap of
silicon.