[Samba] Samba seems to pause for a long time and do nothing

[Peter Lappo]

Hi,
I have a problem with Samba (although it may be my hardware, I'm not sure).

I have a Linux i386 Samba server that I use for storing music, pictures 
etc in a small home network which isn't that busy. When I stream music 
to my laptop I get periods of silence which coincide with periods of 
network inactivity. These can last up to 50 seconds and can be seen on 
both the Linux and PC performance monitors. I thought perhaps I was a 
running an old version of samba and tried to upgrade my Suse 9.2 box. 
Unfortunately this didn't work so I've just installed Fedora 7 core with 
version Samba 3.0.25a. However, the pausing problem is still there. I 
don't get this problem between Windows XP machines and the problem 
occurs with any Windows client. Note, I had to turn off SELinux to get 
samba to work.

I was wondering if there are any config options I should be setting to 
improve performance?
Or perhaps there are some diagnostic tools / extra logging to see what 
is happening?

Regards
Peter

Here is my smb.conf

[global]
    workgroup = smr
    server string = Samba %v
    log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m
    max log size = 50
    passdb backend = tdbsam
    cups options = raw
    security = share
[homes]
    comment = Home Directories
    browseable = no
    writeable = yes

[printers]
    comment = All Printers
    path = /var/spool/samba
    browseable = no
    printable = yes

[music]
    comment = music
    path = /home2/music
    writeable = yes
    guest ok = yes

[backup]
    comment = backup
    path = /home2/backup
    writeable = yes
    guest ok = yes