Avoiding round trips and context switches is desirable in itself, but the real advantage[citation needed] comes from allowing the I/O scheduler in the kernel to do a better job by saturating it with requests coming from all of the applications trying to read their keys (as opposed to a common configuration server serially requesting a single key at a time).

Having all of the keys in a single compact binary format also avoids the intense fragmentation problems currently experienced by the tree-of-directories-of-xml-files approach

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dconf

I didn't know.