Samba speed & HD IO

[bexamous2]

Well I've been running gentoo for awhile, one of its duties is a file server for my home network. My other computer is WinXP, both comptuers are very similar hardware. Both computers have Intel GbE cards in them connected to a dlink dgl4300 router. For last year or so I've been getting ~10MB/sec more or less betweem tej two (samba or ftp)... I even posted here once asking why.. seemed to be stuck at 100mbits/sec for some reason.

Anyways installed conky awhile ago and always watch transfer speeds now, it is displaying netowrk and disk io rates.....


randomly I ran this command:
ifconfig eth0 txqueuelen 1000

and WTF?! now I get 25MB/sec between the computers, that is all I did.

Now the other thing I'm noticing while watching conky that is making no sense to me....

If I'm transfering a file at 25MB/sec over the network, disk IO is a constant 50MB/sec.... before I changed the txqueuelen and was stuck at 10MB/sec... i was copying a 14GB file and entire time network was @ 10MB/sec and diskio was at 20MB/sec......... why is twice as much data being read off the harddrive than is being sent over the network?

Also is there any more dumb commands like that txqueuelen that make such a huge difference heh? I don't believe something so simple could have such a huge result... kinda frustrating, theres only 10,000 settings you can change in linux... who the hell has the time to go try every one?