NAS Performance: NFS vs Samba vs GlusterFS

We use Samba extensively, and I've always found it to typically be faster than NFS in almost all cases (and I only say almost because I haven't compared them enough).

From what I've seen after a couple of packet captures, the SMB protocol can be chatty, but the latest version of Samba implements SMB2 which can both issue multiple commands with one packet, and issue multiple commands while waiting for an ACK from the last command to come back. This has vastly improved its speed, at least in my experience, and I know I was shocked the first time I saw the speed difference too - Troubleshooting Network Speeds -- The Age Old Inquiry