[Samba] write cache size option: why deprecated? doubled my performance

[Peter Mutsaers]

Hello,

I had some troubles with samba performance after I switched my network 
to gigabit ethernet:
FTP gave 50MB/s (on a 5GB file)
NFSv3 40MB/s (win xp client with SFU, free nfs client for windows)
Samba (win XP client) only 15MB/s.

After some fiddling with options, I found out that setting write cache 
size to 256KB resulted in a very big performance improvement, now also 
samba gabe 40MB/s.

The documentation (man-page smb.conf) doesn't mention that this option 
is deprecated. But the log file now prints:
WARNING: The "write cache size" option is deprecated

Question: why is this option deprecated? is there an alternative?

regards,

Peter Mutsaers