I discovered that Ubuntu 11.04 is kinda slow when you have your home directory on NFS, even when NIS itself doesn't have any performence issues.
Still it seems that many applications including Eclipse or Chrome are slow and I'm sure the cause is the NIS home directory.
How can I configure the system so it will behave decent.
In 99% of the time having home directory on NIS/NFS is not so important in my case so I'm looking for alternatives.
I've deployed Ubuntu desktops on gigabit networks before, and despite it being fast, it's not as fast as a local disk, especially with applications that use lots of small little files, like say, your browser profile directory.
Without looking at your set up, I am reasonably certain that this is the case as it's always been a problem with NFS home directories and programs like this. One of the things you can do to mitigate this problem is to cache NFS on the PC you're on:
I've deployed something like this in the past and it helped, but having home directories on a network filesystem can lead to things like this. Something you might want to consider instead is having the home directory be local, but then having a subdirectory underneath that is on NFS instead.