The setup:

We run an instance of cygwin nfsd on a Windows 2008 Server (Xeon 3,2 GHz). There are several Sun Solaris and SunOS machines accessing the shares.

This is the exports file:

/disk3    (rw,all_squash)
/disk2    (rw,all_squash)  

Those paths are soft linked to the relevant cygdrive/d/path/to/dir paths. Some of the folders contain up to 10k files.

The Problem:

ls -la

on the mounted folder on the sun boxes takes 2 - 3 minutes and the general read performance is really bad.

cat filename

displays the file in slow bursts and this hurts performance on tasks that access those shared files heavily.

Processor load is not the issue, the nfs server idles most of the time, the cygwin tasks never get over 1% load.