Death of a thousand needles

So I've noticed these days that Firefox and Safari have taken the route of using sqlite dbs to store all their bookmark, history, favicons, etc... My network home server (10.4.11 serving network homes to 10.4 and 10.5 clients over AFP to ~50 concurrent AFP connections) at times seems to be dying the death of a thousand needles. Slowdown occur where all users get the spinning beach ball. In these moments, AFP will take any upwards 60% of the cpu. Looking at what is being written/read to disk with fslogger, I see that the majority of my rights/reads in these periods are these sqlite-dbs, their journals and the mysterious .dat(someRandomString) and .de(someRandomString) files generated in ~/Library/Safari We redirect our caches to the local host, but redirecting the bookmarks, history, etc dbs isn't an option because our users move between machines and those preferences need to follow them. Because of this move to sqlite dbs, I'm wondering if because of this shift to many mini dbs running concurrently across the network, if AFP is not the best choice for network homes and I should consider moving to NFS?