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 I added 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, 0.02, 0.00
End Benchmark Run: Sun Nov 29 00:48:00 PST 2009
00:48:00 up 14 min, 1 user, load average: 14.43, 4.74, 1.77
INDEX VALUES
TEST BASELINE RESULT INDEX
Dhrystone 2 using register variables 376783.7 20568131.5 545.9
Double-Precision Whetstone 83.1 1157.8 139.3
Execl Throughput 188.3 490.0 26.0
File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks 2672.0 563.0 2.1
File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks 1077.0 550.0 5.1
File Read 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks 15382.0 58805.0 38.2
Pipe-based Context Switching 15448.6 543265.9 351.7
Pipe Throughput 111814.6 1596349.1 142.8
Process Creation 569.3 2885.6 50.7
System Call Overhead 114433.5 2277096.2 199.0
=========
FINAL SCORE 57.7
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