[Samba] Optimizing Samba to stream movies

[Brett Alton]

I am sharing some of my personal videos on a local network via Ubuntu
9.10/Samba 3.42 on my wired PC to wireless Windows XP and Vista users
with a 802.11g router in between. Some of the movies can stream fast
enough to watch uninterrupted, while others seem to skip often.

I searched online to see any optimization techniques and found this is
a popular one for the /etc/samba/smb.conf file:


socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192


This however - even after restarting the samba daemon - seemed to make
little difference.

I'm wondering if the problem is my 802.11g router or my samba install.
Are there any tools I can use/test for optimization? Maybe stream a
1.4GB file via one set of settings and then the same file via
different settings.

Secondly, are there any statistics that samba records (e.g. how many
times a files was accessed, when a file was accessed (or by who), the
bandwidth transferred via all or specific files, etc.)

Thanks for your help! Please CC me as I'm not currently on this list.