samba's protocol and the way it works?

[songwc]

     Hi all. I'm doing a system performance analysis
on a network attached storage (NAS) system using
Raid-5 with 4 hard disks. And would like to know more
about samba's protocol on how a data is transferred
and processed by samba using the example below :

     When a server receives a read/write signal from a
client, what is happening internally between CPU,
cache, ram, ICH2... Where around the hardware has the
highest traffic, will it be any one of the following :
CPU, ram, PCI bus, hard disk or others? Could anyone
advise me on which hardware improvement to maximize
the performance of the overall system? Or the system
is actually losing most of the processing time on the
network connection where retry is occurred frequently
with a lot of clients trying to send and re-send
signals to the server?
     Is there any samba protocol's document available
in the net?

     Cheers and thanks for the helps!!

regards
Wil Choon

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