File System Performance Loss in Genera 8.0 (16X slower!)

[cogen@XN.LL.MIT.EDU]

What has happened to the network file system in going from Genera 7.2 to 8.0?
By one measure, it is 16 TIMES SLOWER THAN BEFORE! I would like to know if
anyone else has experienced this, or is it a problem with our local
installation?

The details: The Symbolics, a 3670, is running 8.0 and uses IP-TCP 422.2 to
communicate with our Sun 3 running 4.0.

The test program: copy 7 binary files from a directory on the Sun to a local
Symbolics directory. The files are in the neighborhood of 10KBytes each and the
directory contains about 140 files.

	Time under 7.2: about 13 seconds.

	Time under 8.0: about 215 seconds.

This is astounding, and completely unusable. Any ideas as to what is wrong? The
bottom right corner of the screen, which indicates file activity, shows that
for each file copied, the directory is opened several times. Thus the time to
copy a file is related to both the size of the file and the size of the
directory. In this example, the size of the directory appears to dominate. But
please don't tell me to make my directory smaller! There has to be another
answer.

Thanks for any advice.

David Cogen.