The critical factor that affected performance was the number of nfsiod threads. Adding more threads means that more simultaneous NFS operations can occur at once (including read-ahead and write-behind operations). To increase this value, simply edit the file /System -> Library -> StartupItems -> NFS -> NFS, and change the line that reads:
nfsiod -n 4Replace the 4 with 8 or more, followed by rebooting or manually killing and re-running nfsiod. You will notice an increase in throughput when writing large files. To test the speed, run the following command before and after the change:
time dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/home/testfile bs=16k count=16384Going from 4 to 8 nfsiod threads resulted in write speeds going from 700k/sec to over 3.2mb/sec! Further tuning can be found by reading the Linux NFS How-To Performance Section.