We study the performance of remote file system access in a cluster environment. Our experimental lightweight system is called ORFA and aims at providing high performance for general purpose file access.

Using a simple protocol allows us to get the best performance from the underlying communication subsystem. Our user-level implementation avoids several kernel constraints and thus provides better performance than NFS.

Moreover, we explore several optimization techniques to reduce the server overhead, which usually is the bottleneck. Performance evaluation shows that data access may saturate the network link while the server remains scalable.