Stephen M. Jones wrote:

> no tweaking, just fresh installs .. so I am assuming that the writes are 32k.

maybe you should check (e.g. with tcpdump) if you are using NFS V3 and a
blocksize of 32k. This should be the case if client and server both
support it, but it's worth checking. I had some (rare) issue like this
with my FreeBSD/Solaris constellation and ended up with setting NFS V3
as a mount-Option on the Client side.
Another thing comes to mind: did you test basic network performance
between the two machines with protocols other than NFS?
A problem I see very often is caused by link speed/mode
auto-negotiation. It is very common (at least in my network environment)
that the switches go to 100MBit/full-duplex while the host do
half-duplex. This has serious impact on network speed. From your later
post I see that the FreeBSD-Machine has about 2.8% collisions. So it
seems it's NIC runs on half-duplex?

Werner