I'm using Openfiler 2.3 on an HP ML370 G5, Smart Array P400, SAS disks combined using RAID 1+0.

I set up an NFS share from ext3 partition using Openfiler's web based configuration, and I succeeded to mount the share from another host. Both host are connected using dedicated gigabit link.

Simple benchmark using dd:

 $ dd if=/dev/zero of=outfile bs=1000 count=2000000
 2000000+0 records in
 2000000+0 records out
 2000000000 bytes (2.0 GB) copied, 34.4737 s, 58.0 MB/s

I see it can achieve moderate transfer speed (58.0 MB/s).

But if I copy a directory containing many small files (.php and .jpg, around 1-4 kB per file) of total size ~300 MB, the cp process ends in about 10 minutes.

Is NFS not suitable for small file transfer like above case? Or is there some parameters that must be adjusted?