PC-NFS very slow

[Brian Jarvis]

I've recently started a new job here at Psychology and have inherited an
interesting problem.

I have a number of Sanyo 386 boxes running Sun's PC-NFS 3.00, equipped
with 3COM 503 cards.  These are connected via ethernet to a Sun 3/280.
The problem is that the NFS's performance is too pitiful for words.  When
having mounted a directory from the server successfully, and entering
"dir", a 26 line directory took over 1.5 minutes.  I have little history
on the performance of this system in the past, or what changes had been
made the configurations before I arrived on the scene, but somehow I've
got to fix this and get the speed back to normal.

A few questions:

About two months ago, the Sun's OS was upgraded to 4.1.  Does anyone know
if there's a conflict or problem with between this version and NFS?

Does anyone have a clue what might be the problem?  Everything seems to
work, it just works dreadfully slow.  Any guesses are gladly accepted!

Brian A. Jarvis,          Rm. 4026, Sidney Smith Hall, Dept. of Psychology,
jarvis at psych.toronto.edu  University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
                          M5S 1A1  (416) 978-3948