I believe NFS is a less chatty protocol with fewer roundtrips. SMB is not a particularly well-designed protocol overall.
My only evidence is anecdotal. Back in ~1998 we had Samba running on our small Linux file server using Windows NT desktops via 10mbit Ethernet. It was dog slow, not just for browsing but on sequential things like file transfer. We installed NFS mounts on the same box, and it turned out to be lightning fast. I don't remember just how fast, but it made everyone go "wow".
Nowadays, with NFS over fast 100mbps or gigabit Ethernet the latency difference probably is not significant enough to make a difference. I prefer NFS just because its more Unixy.
My only evidence is anecdotal. Back in ~1998 we had Samba running on our small Linux file server using Windows NT desktops via 10mbit Ethernet. It was dog slow, not just for browsing but on sequential things like file transfer. We installed NFS mounts on the same box, and it turned out to be lightning fast. I don't remember just how fast, but it made everyone go "wow".
Nowadays, with NFS over fast 100mbps or gigabit Ethernet the latency difference probably is not significant enough to make a difference. I prefer NFS just because its more Unixy.