It's not surprising that it's slow. Handling files has 2 costs associated to it: One is a fixed setup cost, which includes looking up the file metadata, creatin

It's not surprising that it's slow. Handling files has 2 costs associated to it: One is a fixed setup cost, which includes looking up the file metadata, creating connections between all the services that make it possible to access the file, and starting the read/write. The other part is actually transferring the file content. For small files the fixed cost will be the most important factor. The "transfer time" after this "first byte latency" might actually be 0, since all the data could be transferred within a single write call on each node.