Probably. It depends on what your setup is, and especially on _how_ the
programs do their writes.
Check out that you have rsize=8192 and wsize=8192, and then the
write-side caching shouldn't matter for most programs that use buffered
stdio.
However, programs that do not use buffered stdio (do raw "write()" system
calls with small buffers), or that use a line-buffered approach will be
hurt by the lack of write-side caching (well, not so much caching as
"coalescing" of write requests, although the way I'd do it would be to
use the page cache to do the coalescing which is why I call it caching).
In short, for many programs there is not much of a difference. Sadly,
some programs are especially stupid, and one exacmple of this is "as", if
I remember correctly. At least some versions of the GNU assembler did a
"write()" system call for every instruction, so you ended up with _huge_
amounts of NFS packets. Now, that's arguably a misfeature in the program,
but on the other hand we _could_ be faster.
Anyway, the first thing you should check out is that you use a rsize and
wsize of 8192, not the default 1024. Just add "rsize=8192,wsize=8192" to
your NFS mount options in your /etc/fstab if you don't have them already.
And remember, there _is_ life after 2.0. We'll get this issue worked out
soon enough, so don't be too worried about it.
Linus