cifs vs. nfs "chattiness"

[Steve French]

There is an oft-repeated comment that cifs is "chattier" than nfs (e.g.
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/expert/KnowledgebaseAnswer/0,289625,sid5_gci1113518,00.html)

Any idea why such a perception?

I assume it has to do with one or more of the following:

1) NFSv3 does not send open/close (which is a good news ... bad news
story for nfs users of course - there is a good reason that NFSv4
finally added an open call) while cifs does

2) Windows Explorer does lots of ineffecient repeated requests (which
the MS cifs client dutifully send over the wire)

3) CIFS Unix Extensions require three to four operations for
create/mkdir while NFS presumably can do it in one fewer).

But with NFSv4 vs. the current Unix/POSIX extensions it seems NFS is at
least as chatty as cifs (or at least should be) - NFS sends access calls
(which seem chatty to me).  NFS sends a lookup for every path component
(not really required for cifs).   I would not be surprised if a simple
"ls" like operation in a desktop would have to generate more traffic in
NFSv4 than CIFS but presumably is worth diving into when the next POSIX
extensions patches are added to Linux and MAC cifs clients.