How to debug 100x variance in writing the same file?

[John Gerth]

Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-01-20 at 19:46 -0800, John Gerth wrote:
> 
>>I'm just stuck at the moment and not sure that going down to the
>>ethereal level is going to help.
> 
> 
> What makes you say that?
> 
> It is almost always the very first thing we start with - that, and the
> Samba logs.  You should look at what is going on in both.
> 
  There was nothing obvious in the samba log but then again wasn't cranked up
  very high yet.  What level should I use? What sort of entries should I expect?

  The reason I say that about ethereal is that the traffic is very bursty and
  I think I've pretty much eliminated an outright network problem since the
  same WinXP client has no problems with a Win2k3 server.  This makes
  me think that it's something on the Xserve which is just making it
  go comatose for long periods.