Newbie Question: Read Performance

I have the default EventStore installation running on my developer rig.
I have a single stream with about 7000 events – each one of these events are quite small. The entire event stream serialized into json is about 3 - 4 MB.

When I call client.ReadStreamEventsForward(), I get the slice back with the events, still as a byte array.

That call, before the deserialization, is taking about 1.2 - 1.6 seconds.

When I do a RDFL against the server, it’s reading about 70,000 reqs / sec…

I understand that RDFL runs async, so my question is this. How long should I expect it to take to read all the events for a single stream?

Should I async the reads and await the result? How big a slice is too big?

I ask for ReadStreamEventsForward(stream, 0, int.MaxValue, false);

Should I read the events as a page?

Thanks!

The really strange thing, is that if I only ask for 1 event, it still takes about as long…