[Samba] slow file transfers

[Farrell Farahbod]

I have setup a linux fileserver, and used the SMB protocol to share the
data. Right now I'm just trying to work all the kinks out, so both the
fileserver and the client run linux, but in the future I will have
Windows clients. Transfering files between the same two computers is
very fast with NFS (~20-40MBps... gigabit ethernet, switched... no hubs)
but with Samba its very slow at ~2MBps, and the latency is a bitch
sometimes. For example, if I watch an AVI off of my fileserver, and try
to fast forward, it takes tens of seconds for it to update, compared to
virtually instantanious if the AVI is stored locally. Latency only seems
to be a problem with movies and fast forwarding, so perhaps its an issue
with mplayer and how it askes for the data. 

I don't know how to start tackling this problem. My guess is to first
rule out the client. First my /etc/fstab mounted the share with smbfs,
but I also tried with cifs. No noticable change :( Kernel verison is
2.6.11-gentoo-r11, by the way. 

So are there any other ways to mount or access (read-write) SMB shares,
so I can try to rule out my client. Or any other ways to rule out my
client. Checking the output of dmesg and /var/log/everything/current on
both the client and server don't show anything unusual. 

And any ideas on how I can rule out the server? 

Thanks, 
--Farrell F.
-- 
Farrell Farahbod <upgrdman at mindspring.com>