NFS - slow write speed

[marshmallow1304]

I just tried NFS for the first time after reading that it's considerably faster than SSHFS, which I currently use, but I'm experiencing slow write speeds and problems while copying files in nautilus.


Server (swaim) - Debian Lenny:

/data system76-pc(rw,sync,no_subtree_check)

Client (system76-pc) - Ubuntu 10.04

mount -t nfs swaim.local:/data Desktop/nfsmount

A 1.2 GB file over NFS:

Write:

dd if=Desktop/new\ downloads/Pioneer.One.S01E01.720p.x264-VODO/Pioneer.One.S01E01.720p.x264-VODO.mkv of=Desktop/nfsmount/pioneer-test.mkv
2289665+1 records in
2289665+1 records out
1172308607 bytes (1.2 GB) copied, 212.575 s, 5.5 MB/s

Read:

dd if=Desktop/nfsmount/pioneer-test.mkv of=Desktop/pioneer-test.mkv
2289665+1 records in
2289665+1 records out
1172308607 bytes (1.2 GB) copied, 115.838 s, 10.1 MB/s

Next I copied the same file in Nautilus:
sshfs write: 3:51 (~4.84 MB/s)
sshfs read: 3:42 (~5.04 MB/s)
nfs write: 3:46 (~4.85 MB/s) (File Operations dialog (and nautilus) froze during the transfer, but it finished eventually)
nfs read: 2:28 (~7.55 MB/s)


Are these reasonable speeds? I was excited after seeing these benchmarks, but I'm not seeing impressive results other than read speed.

[marshmallow1304]

bump

Also, when copying files (client->server) in Nautilus, I get extremely heavy RAM usage on the client (copying 11 GB in 22 files with Firefox and Nautilus open). free -m shows 31 M free out of 3930. The transfer started very fast (~25 MB/s) then dropped down to ~3-5 MB/s with intermittent freezing.

Edit: Same thing using cp -r. I had to kill the transfer because everything else was freezing up.