Thanks to all who replied. Looks like NFS is terribly hoggish about memory,

i/o or processor time if the traffice is light (which mine is).

nfsstat was reccommended - something I had not yet looked at.

etherfind/snoop too.

the following was also reccommended by Bismark Espinoza:

"reduce the NFS read and write buffer sizes, and increase the timeout

period since you are using a WAN connection."

Re: system time, the following suggestion was from Leif Ericksen:

"IF it is a hard mount it will take some time away from the system. THe

system will keep checking the mounts to see if they are still there and

generate errors if it is not.

Now if the systems are auto mounted that should not be that bad of a

deal. That would be best make it so that the remote machines only mount

the disks when required. IF it is something like user data, it will

only mount once the user logs on."

unfortunately, the data is not intermittantly used and should be available

to all users all the time.

thanks again,

Harry