According to an article by NFS Performance Tuning by Ben Martin, adding a async parameter in the NFS mount in fstab. Tested on Fedora 9
fileserver:/home /home nfs async,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,intr 0 0
According to the article, using async will cause the speed of the NFS mount to be close to actual local disk speed. Furthermore, you can increase the buffer size of rsize and wsize from the default 4096 to 8192
intr - allow signal to interrupt file operation especialy if it is hard-mounted
hard - by default
