I may have missed part of this thread so please forgive me if this
does not pertain to your situation.
If all of this is on your LAN and you are behind a firewall and your
machines are fairly well locked down, then one faster option would be
to set up nfs mounts to or from your machines and use that instead.
SSH is a great solution when traversing networks. If everything is
contained to your lan, then why waste the cpu cycles. NFS will be
much faster and will take up far less resources.
Regards,
Aaron
