crap, apologies for the non checked return address. In the interest of trying to make a relevant reply - doesn't nfs3 support differing COMMIT sync levels which could be leveraged for this? (assuming your server is stable :)
<aside> I recall using NFS for file storage at Dreamworks in the late '90s and discovering the reason that the SGI file servers boxes outperformed everything else is that they lied to the client and indicated data has been synced to disk as soon as it hit memory. Wonderful performance feature... until someone insisted in putting known buggy ATM drivers into production which could give up to a GB of lost data when the fileservers paniced... </aside>
