[Samba] extreme performance requirements

[John McCain]

We are trying to use Samba to serve as a file server to support an
application requiring relatively low absolute bandwidth, but extremely low
latency (think voice over IP).  We find that while Samba (with Linux)
gives very good performance compared to windows, we find that as time
progresses, minimum latency seems to step up while under load from our
application.  It is almost as if the server is trying to throttle the
session.  Our application will eventually fail due to this increasing
latency.

We have tried this with 2.6 and 2.4 kernels (Mandrake 10 and 9.2,
repectively), with the packaged versions of Samba that come with those
distros.

Does anyone know anything we could try?

Thanks.