I am running Slackware64 14.2, KDE and am using Dolphin file manager. I have a remote directory (also hosted on Slackware 14.2) mounted via nfs.

When I open this mount via Dolpin it can take up to 30 seconds to show the files and folders in this directory. Navigating to sub-directories can also take almost as long to show contents, even if the sub-directory contains only 4 files. At best there is a delay of at least 10 seconds. Once directories have been navigated-to the 1st time, access is fast thereafter, but if Dolphin sits for a while with no activity I'm back to the slow response. This is unacceptable to my user and he is threatening to go back to Windows (horrors!).

Does anyone have an idea what the problem could be? Should I try something other than nfs? Is this a problem with dolphin? Recommendations?

You can test with other file managers, mc for example. If it's faster there than in dolphin it's most likely this bug: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178678

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Well, the solution turned out to be interesting. It has nothing to do with which file manager I use. My original fstab entry was:
and I simply changed it to:
i.e. I removed the nfsver=4. That resulted in the mount folder coming up virtually immediately! I'm going to give this a few more days before I consider it resolved, but in the meantime, if someone can offer an explanation for this, I'd appreciate it. I'd like to know why nfs version 4 has such a latency and, importantly, what is version 4 suppose to *do* that's good?

more info

Here is a link describing what v4 does: http://www.iaps.com/NFSv4-new-features.html. Here's an interesting one, "compound RPC calls improve performance, particularly by eliminating much communication latency." Hmmm, so why is my experience significantly slower (10 to 30 second latency) *with* v4? There are a number of other alleged enhancements including support for "Windows-based ACLs" (which I've never seen the usefulness thereof in Unix systems. I tend to consider ACLs an easily defeatable additional security layer to 'fix' Windows' inherently insecure file system).

For v4 to work as advertized, do I have to specify something in the nfs server exports or config? The server exports is currenly simply:

If someone has some insight or theories as to why nfs v4 is slower than nfs-notV4, I'd be grateful for the info. If no interest, I'll mark this one as solved.