At one client I finally began to experiment with imaging Mavericks. I built a 10.9.2 NetBoot set, but noticed that performance when imaging was terrible (as in, it took over an hour to lay down the base OS image and packages to be installed - something that maybe took 20 minutes before).
I used the free Helios LANtest (http://www.helios.de) tool to benchmark SMB performance.
First from 10.8.x (or 10.9.x by using cifs:// instead of smb://), I ran LANtest with its destination volume pointed to the server.
Then, did the same from 10.9.x. Write performance doubled in 10.9.2 versus 10.8.5, but read performance slowed to 1/10 of what it was. No wonder imaging was taking forever!
On my Mavericks NetBoot image, I created the /etc/nsmb.conf file, with the following two lines:
[default]
smb_neg=smb1_only
Once I started from it, I re-ran the benchmarks before imaging. Performance was back to normal.
Just thought that others may want to take this approach to make sure they're getting decent performance.
(Disclaimer: Mavericks poor SMB performance was discussed here/found this thread after fixing my issue, but before posting):
https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=8842
