Gluster users - Jun 2010 - Performance questions/tweaks on Gluster

I've now got Gluster 3.04 up and running on my servers.
 
Setup:

gluster1 - back end file server
gluster2 - ditto. Redundant. These are setup with the --raid 1 option
app1 - my app server mounts /data/export on /home
app2 - ditto
 
The appropriate conf files are attached.
 
My simple test involves reading an input file and writing it to the
Gluster home versus local /tmp.
 
These tests were conducted using standard log files produced by our
application.

Writing is 75x-ish slower. Reading is 15x-ish slower. Now, obviously,
there's some overhead with regards to the Gluster system, and while
the overall numbers themselves aren't bad in the real world, I'm
wondering what, if any, performance tweaks I could be using to help
this out. I don't think a 75x hit for writing a text file is normal.
 
The app servers are far more read-heavy than write-heavy. Writing will
be done in small chunks appending to files (audit logging, uploading
images, writing out temp files from the application).
 
glusterTest output:
 
Writing  5000 lines to  /home/output
13.9113419056

Writing  5000 lines to  /tmp/output
0.184456825256

Reading  /home/output
Read 5000 lines in 0.0903789997101 seconds.

Reading  /tmp/output
Read 10000 lines in 0.00640416145325 seconds.