[Samba] Samba performance issues

[Bradley W. Langhorst]

probably you want to run the iostat 1 during heavier load...
however the summary result does look funny to me...

On my system we have ~ 1:1 ratio of reads to writes
you have a ~ 1:200 ratio of reads to writes.
Does that make sense in your environment?

It doesn't look like your system has a memory problem so i'd not worry
about vmstat.

I should probably shut up now because I'm walking out of the realm of my
experience - is that going to stop me ... no.

Does anybody else think maybe the raid1 code is trying to optimize read
IO performance by splitting across disks at the expense of CPU?

Suggestions to find out..
1) use a hardware raid card
2) try running in degraded mode with one disk to see if you get an
increase in performance.

if somebody else with the same kind of system chimes in and says that
they handle the same load with similar or lesser hardware look for a
hardware problem. 

maybe my impression is wrong and that is not enough machine to do what
you want... if you really do need more cpu you could try segmenting your
file services and having different machines serve each segment

brad