why is filesystem intensive script not faster on ram disk

I have a script which creates a lot of files and directories. The script does black box tests for a program which works with a lot of files and directories. The test count grew and the tests were taking too long (over 2 seconds). I thought I run the tests in a ram disk.

I ran the test in /dev/shm. Strangely it did not run any faster. Average run time was about the same as on normal harddisk. I also tried in a fuse based ram disk written in perl. The website is gone but I found it in the internet archive. Average run time on the fuse ram disk is even slower. Perhaps because of the suboptimal implementation of the perl code.

Here is a simplified version of my script:

#! /bin/sh

preparedir() {
  mkdir foo
  mkdir bar
  touch bar/file
  mkdir bar/baz
  echo qux > bar/baz/file
}

systemundertest() {
  # here is the black box program that i am testing
  # i do not know what it does exactly
  # but it must be reading the files
  # since it behaves differently based on them
  find $1 -type f -execdir cat '{}' \; > /dev/null

singletest() {
  mkdir actual
  (cd actual; preparedir)
  systemundertest actual
  mkdir expected
  (cd expected; preparedir)
  diff -qr actual expected
}

manytests() {
  while read dirname; do
    rm -rf $dirname
    mkdir $dirname
    (cd $dirname; singletest)
  done
}

seq 100 | manytests

The real script does a bit more error checking and result collecting and a summary. The find is a dummy for the actual program I am testing.

I wonder why my filesystem intensive script does not run faster on a memory backed filesystem. Is it because the linux kernel handles the filesystem cache so efficiently that it practically is a memory backed filesystem?