GGatec Performance

[Joseph Yeager]

     I've been messing around ggatec lately and have noticed that I see a
drastic decrease in write speed when I share out devices as opposed to
files.  For instance, lets say Server2 is trying to share a drive to
Server1.  Server2 has 2 partitions, one for the OS and the other for the
share.  If I do a newfs on the 2nd partition, mount it, and create a large
file on the mount I can expect a slowdown of about 5-10MB/s compared to
native speed (the drive writes at about 50-55MB/s natively) when writing
over the network.  If I were to, instead, do the same as above except dont
bother mounting and creating a large file and just sharing out the device I
see a major slowdown.  Where I can easily get 40-50MB/s with the former
method, the latter method has trouble hitting 15MB/s.  Sometimes it will
barely hit 5MB/s!  I see two possible solutions here that I hope someone can
help me with:
     1.  Perhaps there are some performance tuning steps I can do to
alleviate this problem or perhaps this is the incorrect way to share it out.
     2.  Is there any way to quickly create large files?  I do like this
approach better as this gives me a better way to subdivide the share.  The
only problem is that even at over 50MB/s, dd will still take a very long
time to create a 500GB file.

Thanks for your help,
Joe