The results are still not flattering and are nothing close to native performance. Unless GlusterFS has a "DRBD-like" option to delay writes over the network and to only read from the client side, I don't see how performance can ever improve much more.
After doing some client optimizations Iadded more to the score:
Start Benchmark Run: Sun Nov 29 00:37:44 PST 2009
00:37:44 up 3 min, 1 user, load average: 0.01........