Performance characteristic of various filesystem

[Lie Ryan]

Do anyone know the performance characteristic of various file systems 
(ext2, ext3, ntfs, etc)?

I'm not interested in how fast read/write is in the file system, rather I 
want to know how the filesystem copes with large numbers of files.

Since some time ago, I've started zipping up folders with large number of 
small files to reduce the number of files. Recently, I've been wondering 
whether this practice is actually useful at all, especially since zipping 
up files would make it difficult to find duplicates with fdupes.

So, I want to know whether my zipping things up would actually give any 
performance improvements or not.

TIA.