[Samba] Samba versus NFS client??

[graemew at excoeng.com]

We have been running Samba for several years, recently V2.0.7 on Solaris 7
but just upgraded to V2.2.7 on Solaris 8.  The servers are linked to Cisco
switches via gigabit adapter and all UNIX and Windows clients are on
100/Full.  We have a mixture of AIX, Solaris, NT and 2000 clients

We deal the typical Word/Excel/PowerPoint files but also have very large
CAD files, 50MB to 2GB.  We have never used Samba to serve these larger
files because of performance reasons, instead we used Hummingbird Maestro
NFS Client on NT/2000.  The download speed to UNIX clients has never been a
problem and typically works out to be about 5-8MB/sec

I did some benchmarks this past week and using NFS the client took 38
seconds to upload a 288MB file to the server while Samba took 82 seconds!
Download was, nfs - 50 seconds, Samba - 60 seconds, for the same file.

My issue now is that I to get rid of Maestro.  I have tried different
settings of SO_SNDBUF and SO_RCVBUF, varying from 4096 to 32768, with no
net change in speed.   Is this just inherent in the smb protocol versus
nfs, which is what I have been lead to believe from previous sysadmins?
How can I make Samba as fast as NFS?

[global]
        workgroup = EXCOENG
        netbios name = MARS
        netbios aliases = PHOBOS
        security = DOMAIN
        encrypt passwords = Yes
        password server = trident, rodeo
        log level = 1
        log file = /var/samba/logs/log.%m
        max log size = 500
        name resolve order = host wins bcast
        deadtime = 15
        lpq cache time = 30
        socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY
        lock dir = /var/samba/locks
        pid directory = /var/samba/locks
        write list = administrator
        printer admin = administrator
        print command = echo Printing %s at %p >> /tmp/print.log;
/usr/ucb/lpr -P %p %s; rm %s

[Eng_share]
        comment = Engineering data
        path = /data1/Eng_share
        read only = No
        create mask = 0664
        force create mode = 0664
        directory mask = 0775
        force directory mode = 0775

Graeme Walker
System Administrator
Exco Engineering