samba - Jun 2007 - Only 3/4, 1/2 or 1/4 transfer speed of the theorethical

Hi All,

I finally decided to contact you.
This problem bothers me for at least 5 years.
I use Debian Linux-es with 2.6.16 - 2.6.19 kernels.
Our computers on 100 MBit ethernet network. As we connect two windowses 
(XPs) they can transfer 9-10 MByte/s. That's the the theoretichal max.
In the past when one side was linux the max speed was 7.5 MByte/s
(This is the 3/4).
When we connected two linuxes they could produce only 5 MByte/s.

The today situation is even worse.
Currently the office server runs samba 3.0.23d debian sarge(ish). My 
computer runs debian etch (4.0) with samba 3.0.25. The maximum transfer 
speed is around 2.5 MByte/s. This is quite unacceptable. When I use 
Windows XP it's significantly higher, around 6-7 MByte/s. I just tried 
to tune the socket options like
    socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_KEEPALIVE SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192
   read raw = yes/no
   write raw = yes/no
   max xmit = 1400

They not helped. This happened every hardware that used in the last 5 
years. So please somebody try to connect two debian linuxes with samba 
and try to transfer a bigger file. I almost sure he or she will 
experience the same. In the documentation is written that it can perform 
like NFS. This is far from the truth in my case. Please help.

Viktor