Most Efficient Network File sharing protocol?

[Dan Mossor]

What do y'all consider the most efficient network file system? NFS? SMB? 
SFTP?

I've been doing a lot of file transfers across the network, and have 
been, well, less than impressed with the performance of NFS.

I haven't set up a samba server yet (and I wasn't sure the SMB protocol 
itself would support hard links, even if the underlying file system did).

SFTP seems like it would put too much of a load on the CPU with the 
encryption, and in fact, I almost cooked an RPi by transferring stuff 
through SFTP and SSHFS.

What am I forgetting about?

-- 
Dan Mossor
Systems Engineer at Large
Fedora QA Team Volunteer FAS: dmossor IRC: danofsatx
San Antonio, Texas, USA