Slow transfers with SMB/Samba, very fast with NFS

[upgrdman]

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. 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.

[KiTaSuMbA]

First, you could try a stream or a file copy using directly smb://<path> instead of mounting, though I doubt you would see any reasonable difference in performance.
You could also try to measure transfers with a windows smb server if you have any handy. However, in my personal experience, smb has always been a bad performer, with comparable (if not worse) results as with sftp or scp. If you are in an all-*nix, trusted LAN I would say dump the entire smb business and go for some mixture of NFS, CodaFS, ftp or whatever best fits your needs.
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