Xserver AFP Slowness

Hello, Please I need some help. If you have good knowledge on AFP you might have seen or notice the problem I am seeing. In short just to give you our story. We have Mac OS X clients using AFP mounted home directories. Home directories are mounted at the file system level which can contain between 100-500 user home directories. Authentication both clients and servers is received via NetInfo Mac OS X 10.2.8. Home directories served by 1 Mac OS X 10.3.2 servers (dual processor Xserves) on 1000 MB full duplex switched connections. Short Description of the problem. The Mac OS X clients begin acting slow. This can range in severity from minor sluggishness to unusable (second or two delay now and then to 5 minutes to launch a program). During this delay the cursor will turn to the colored spinning Thanks you for your help.