[Samba] how to max out performance with only one client

[Ralf Herrmann]

Dear all,

i setup a file server with latest debian distro and samba 3.0.10.
Kernel is 2.6.11 self-compiled.

It's for a small home LAN with max. 2 clients.
When i connect with only 1 client, i get a
throughput of about 6MByte/s reading a large file.
(Writing is even slower, but this is due to software-raid5).

Both disk systems as well as CPU are not at max rates.
There is 30-40% CPU idle and the raid 5 can write and read about
20MByte/s for large files.

I have testet with one 3com and one intel 100MBit NIC, no big difference.
All cards are correctly working at 100MBit FD, connected through
a switch to my PC.

When i make 2 simultanous client connections from my PC, it seems,
samba saturates the 100MBit line because i'm getting 2x about
5MB/s read performance (again for large files).

I also tested with ftp and get about 11 MB/s with a single client
wich is the max one could expect.

Does anyone know how to make samba max out with only
one client? Background is that i want to directly burn DVD
from the shares as fast as possible. I need about 8.5MB/s read speed.

Any help is appriciated. I searched the net for quite some time
but didn't find any useful hint.
Some people had a similar problem, but no suitable answer so far.

Thanks,

Ralf