[Samba] Samba - Performance Issues

[Vinay Kudithipudi]

Hello Guys,
  I am having some problems with configuring SAMBA with regards to
performance. We are running SAMBA 2.2.3a on Dual PIII 1Ghz machines with
512MB of RAM. The server is running on a default server installation of Red
Hat 7.2. We have a 500Gb RAID 5 drive using the Promise SX6000 Raid
controller.
  Currently we are only getting a throughput of ~5MB/S for writes and
~13MB/S for reads. Comparing that to NFS which yealds ~15MB/S for reads and
~13MB/S for writes. This clearly rules out the Hardware bottleneck since XFS
is able to perform better on the same hardware. Here is the smb.conf I am
using currently

===SMB.CONF===
[global]
	workgroup = MYGROUP
	netbios name = {HOSTNAME}
	wins server = {WINSSERVER}
	server string = {HOSTNAME}
	security = SHARE
	encrypt passwords = Yes
	log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m
	max log size = 50
	socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192
	dns proxy = No
	oplocks = No
	level2 oplocks = No

[homes]
	comment = Home Directories
	read only = No
	browseable = No

[Data]
	comment = Data Backup Directory
	path = /home/gm/data
	guest account = 
	valid users = spirian
	read only = No
======

I was wondering if there is any documentation for fine tuning SAMBA. Any
help is appreciated. Thanks.

Vinay Kudithipudi
Associate Network Operations Engineer
Spirian Technologies Inc.