It sounds like you're expecting NFS to be a reliable, proven, high-performance technology. It's anything but. I've never encountered an implementation without h

It sounds like you're expecting NFS to be a reliable, proven, high-performance technology. It's anything but. I've never encountered an implementation without horrible bugs, most commonly involving locking and atomicity issues. Things get oh-so-much worse if you have to mix implementations, and performance is always bad. I would never consider NFS an option in any production system. On a more general note, anything you build that relies on the particular semantics of any sort of traditional filesystem is sure to be wrong, either now or in the future when it needs to be run on a different filesystem. This is an area of software engineering that's a serious pain in the ass. Avoid it whenever you can.