Samba Speed Issues and Information

[Jeremiah Gowdy]

I've recently switched my company from a Windows NT fileserver to
FreeBSD/Samba.  It's working really great and I absolutely love Samba.  The
only reason I'm asking about speed issues and tweaking, is I heard someone
say something about it that implied that there are tricks/tweaks you can do
to increase the speed of Samba's interactions with Win98 computers.  My
company uses a DOS based Database program (custom), which simply uses file
sharing.  Several things take quite a bit of time, like running reports,
posting, etc, even though (a) the processor load on the PII 350s isn't
anywhere near 20%, and (b) the network is 100BaseTx running on a very nice
3Com Switch.  The FreeBSD server is a Dual Pentium III 500 with 256 megs,
and the hard drive is 7200rpm SCSI-3.  In other words, we have much more
hardware than required.  I'm thinking something simple, like the caching,
packet size, etc is causing lag or overhead that keeps our system from
performing to it's fullest.  If there's a page with some tips and tricks for
fine tuning Samba and/or FreeBSD's networking, I would much appriciate any
links or advice.  Thanks.

Kudos to the FreeBSD and Samba teams for all the time and effort you put
into these products, which we all use.