[Samba] Throughput to a single client

[AndyLiebman at aol.com]

I have a Linux Server (3.06 Xeon) with a very fast RAID array -- reads at 
around 500 MB/sec as clocked by Bonnie++. I have 6 GigE nics on my machine  -- on 
two 133Mhz PCI-x bus segments (not on the same bus as the RAID drives)

I have noticed two puzzling things and I'm wondering if anybody has any ideas 
about why I'm seeing these: 

1)  transfer speeds over a single NIC from a single Windows XP workstation to 
the Server (host to host, no switch in between) starts out at around 43 
MB/sec but then drops off to around 30 MB/sec. I don't think it's a disk speed 
issue on the Windows side, because data is coming from an 8 disk RAID-5 on the 
Windows side. 

2)  transfer speed from the Server to 3 windows workstations seems to max out 
at around 60 MB/sec total. One windows workstation can get around 40-45 
MB/sec, but if I try to achieve maximum transfer speed with to 3 Windows machines 
each only gets about 20 MB/sec. Again, I don't think it's a disk speed thing on 
the Linux side -- and on the Windows side the data is not being stored on 
disk but rather it's being played out as video. 

So, the question is, does Samba have any configuration options that might 
limit the total throughput to the Network? And if it's not Samba that's causing 
the bottleneck, does anyone have any other ideas. 

Thanks in advance. 
Andy Liebman