Samba mounts slow, samba client fast?

[Sebastian Redl]

Hi,

I've got a rather weird problem. I've got a little home network with
Samba 3.0.10 running. It works very well, serving various Windows
computers (WinXP and Win98, mostly.)
In addition, I can dual-boot one of these computers into Linux. The
Linux in question is a true 64-bit 2.6.9 kernel running on an Athlon64
3000+.
When I mount my samba shares from this machine, they are inexplicably
slow. However, when I use smbclient to log into the server, they are
fast: 1000kB/s download, a 2.3 MB file taking about 3 seconds. With cp
and the mounted shares, the same copy operation takes 7+ seconds. Even
scp is faster than that.
In fact, the samba mounts are so slow that I can't even play MP3s from
the music share without the audio stream halting every now and then.
Don't even think of videos.
Client-side samba is version 3.0.10 as well.

Right now I'm using NFS instead, but a normal Samba is faster, so I'd
prefer that. (The speed difference is most notable when XMMS is loading
extended info on files in the playlist. Under usual circumstances, it
inspects about 4 files/sec with NFS vs 10+/sec with Samba.)

Thanks in advance.

Sebastian Redl