Gnome with homedirs over slow NFS

[Sean Millichamp <sean compu-aid net>]

I have about 9 workstations running Red Hat Linux 9 GNOME desktops over
a T1 (1.54 Mbps) WAN link with NFS mounted home directories.

The users know that it won't run as well as if it were directly
connected (obviously) but have been complaining about it being so slow
as to be unusable at times and I don't think that it should be that bad.

I did a tcpdump of the network traffic and the majority seems to be
GNOME/Nautilus related NFS traffic where it seems to be stat()ing a
number of files repeatedly.  

I haven't spent a whole lot of time digging into this yet but I did some
Google searches and came up empty handed.

Is there anyone else in this situation?  Is there a way to disable the
frequent stating of files?  I'm willing to give up some of the features
of GNOME if it means generating less NFS traffic to the homedirs...

Thanks!

Sean