I didn't think lvm2 had such a big performance hit?Did you try to ajust the read ahead with blockdev on the LV itself?
65Mb/s on the raid5 device 44Mb/s on the lv
# blockdev --setra XXXX /dev/sda (raid5 device, just for comparisson) # blockdev --setra XXXX /dev/vg/lv (lv)