A user is probably more interested in the response time for typical user commands, such as listing a directory, making or removing a directory, and creating or removing a file. However, when such commands are executed for NFS mounted file systems, the NFS command response times become a factor in user command response time. The transparent nature of the NFS protocol allows a user to define a set of commands as a measurement workload with a minimum amount of effort.

For those desiring more detail on NFS command response time, there are public domain programs as well as industry standard benchmarks. Both of these options require more experience on the part of the user and may have limitations on their usage. Such programs are typically written for the UNIX environment and may not support all NFS client and server systems.