The Fastest DBA Contest benchmark was run against a server with only 1 disk so spreading out the I/O over multiple dbspaces wouldn't do too much good. My server has access to multiple RAID10 sets that are made up of 6 to 10 drives each so I think I can get some benefit from spreading out the I/O. dbspace1 has 6 drives, dbspaces 2 and 3 have 8 drives and dbspace 4 has 10 drives.

What is the first thing everyone does when tuning an engine for the first time? Check the buffers and increase them if they haven't been changed from the default setting. We want to minimize I/O because I/O sucks and takes a long time. Putting as much likely to be used again very soon data into cache is a good way to minimize I/O.