Very slow nfs client (woody) > server (woody)

[Mark C <lists@funkypenguin.net>]

Hi,

I'm posting this as a last resort, as I'm now at my wits end, after
several hrs googling and reading the man pages, I'm still no closer to
solving this mystery.

My NFS server is running stock woody (with all updates) and exporting
several shares, a few for public access and one for the /home directory
,which clients mount (ok, only me and my wife), I have decided to change
my workstation to woody (was running redhat, due to it having more
cutting edge stuff, but lets not go there), 

I have woody running perfectly, yet it takes an age to read/write any
files from my nfs server, where as redhat is (for nfs clients anyway)
blistering fast, I have tried several wsize and rsize options, but its
still very slow, I'm currently running 2.4.20 kernel 
(hoping this would help, but nope)

Heres my current mount arguments in /etc/fstab:

loki:/nfs-exports/tmp /pub/tmp nfs      
nfsvers=2,rsize=4096,wsize=4096,hard,bg  0 0

And I am running lockd and rpc.statd on the client as well

I decided to dual boot with redhat and woody, and do some comparisons, 
Copying 1.2GB of data (a single tarball) from client to server

Redhat: 15 mins
Woody: 55 mins

As I mount my home directory, its causing all programs to slow down to a
crawl, whilst they are reading or writing to the directory.

Please do not take this as a threat (and its not meant by this at all), 
I'm seriously looking at switching back to redhat, not that I want to
but from what I have read I have tried most things, as its now got to
the point of being unbearable ad causing my to do little or no work.