[Samba] Speed vs Windows systems issue

[Michael St. Laurent]

Hello,

I've a CentOS-5 system (kernel-2.6.18-8.1.14el5) SMP arch running
samba-3.0.27a.  A user reported extremely long load time (11 minutes) of
a 43MB file across a 3Mb/sec WAN link.  Copying the same file to a
windows server and opening it from there on the same client system took
about 2:30.

Research found the below thread from April:

http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2007-April/131096.html

I made the same registry changes to the client system and the socket
options change to the server that were mentioned in the posts and tried
it again.  This time the load speed from the Samba server was 1:30,
faster than the Windows system... which is as *should* be!  ;)

When the load times were slow I had no socket options entry at all in
the smb.conf file (per recent discussions on the list about them being
counter-productive).

Since we've got about 500 systems here I would really rather not do the
registry change on all of them if there is a way to change something on
the Samba server to make this work.

Can someone give the lowdown on what is going on here (or a hint about
where to find it if it's already been explained)?

Thanks for your time.