OT: Windows and file share speeds

[Fairlight]

Okay, blatantly OT, but I know at least one other person (JE, I believe)
confirmed that he's experienced this, and I'm wondering if anyone else has
seen it and knows -why- it is so.

I have three computers.  I can get a good 295KB/sec in and out of the 10b2
system, and 430-490KB/sec in and out of the two 10bT systems to and from
each other using ftp.  (Wireless LAN on 802.11b, in an electromagnetic
black hole of an apartment...lots of interference, which is why it's a bit
slower than one would expect.  I gave up on cordless phones long ago.)

However, when using an SMB mounted share with samba (one is linux, one is
win2k), or when sharing between win95 and win2k, the transfer rate is
chopped down to about 150KB/sec maximum.  I'm not just talking about doing
it over a mount, either.  I've tried smbclient and had it actually clock
the rate, and it -will- throttle it down that far.  That's a difference of
almost three times the speed.

I'm curious what about SMB actually causes this, since it happens between
Windows systems and not just with samba.  The timings all calculate out to
about the same--roughly 155KB/sec, even though the slowest machine can do
nearly twice that.

I'd love to hear theories or be shown references.  I'm at the point where
I'm ready to stick apache on the win2k server and turn it back on the win95
server and just use http across all platforms, since it's easier than
getting a decent ftpd for Windows.

If I want convenience, I just use SMB...I'll cp from linux to windows or
the other way around off the mounted share.  But considering I was moving
10gigs of data, I decided 7hrs was a bit more friendly than 20hrs or so.
So I opened up the windows ftp client and had at it.  But there shouldn't
-be- a discrepancy unless SMB has a -really- bloated overhead.  This
wouldn't surprise me, but you'd have to really work hard to take a 60%
speed hit.  

Maybe it uses small packets?  Only thing that comes to mind.  It seriously
is like the difference between running NFS with 1K packets as opposed to 8K
packets.  Maybe that's is, as it seems you can further saturate the
wireless traffic with things like VNC or other traffic at the same time and
it fits in there.  So I don't think it's bloated, but it's "off" in some
odd way I can't seem to figure out.

It's just a puzzle that's driving me slowly mad. :) If anyone knows the
answer, I wouldn't mind hearing it.  If anyone knows a -solution- I'd be
even more interested in hearing how to get ftp-like performance speeds out
of SMB.

mark->
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