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ext2 performance tuning

Hello all,

(please pardon my English)

I'm running into severe performance problems with
an application that is hitting the filesystem really hard.  

The hardware it is running on is a PII 450, with 256 MB of memory,
3 128 Mb swap partitions, Adaptec AIC-7895 Ultra SCSI adapter, one
internal Seagate ST34520W disk, and two external DEC RZ2DD-LS disks.

The application in question is a web-based course app, which
creates a lot of tiny files. Recently, it managed to use
up 2.2 million inodes(!) on 4 gigs of disk, which is more
than our newserver, usually the ultimate filesystem pathological
application, was using on its entire disk, at the time.  

Accessing any files in that application's partitions is extremely
slow. It takes a full 7 seconds to run an 'ls' listing on a directory
with ~5000 files. Creating a similar directory (with empty files,
however) on another Linux system, and doing the same ls listing
only takes 2 seconds. Unfortunately, this application needs
to make frequent listings of certain directories, so its
performance for the moment is best described as sub-optimal.  

Does anyone have any advice about, or know where I could
find information on, performance tuning for ext2 filesystems,
or Linux in general?  

This is a production application, so unfortunately I'm not
able to use solutions that are alpha, spiffy, problably lots
of fun to play with but potentially unstable. 

Thank you,

-- Julie