According to @elek this is what you get with ext4:
As it is the default for most Linux I’d say the implementation is not suited for the system. That’s why the implementation needs to be adapted.
I don’t think that is true either. Looking at this issue:
The filewalkers are a problem on the select nodes as well and these should be datacenter grade nodes.
What Storj maybe could be doing is to to make system recommendations to for individual node operators that handle the load better than the default installations. For select nodes they might be able to force specific hard- or software setups as mandatory on the datacenters, like telling them the nodes must be running on ZFS with SSD metadata cache miniumum 1GB / TB stored. A datacenter should be able to follow such requirement.
@Mad_Max thanks again for your extensive investigations and reports. This is just great.