I have been really annoyed at this iBook since it was very very slow to my Samba servers - around 200kb/sec - and no amount of fiddling the Samba could get it to go fast.
First I tested using my Windows machines to the Samba servers in question and they were very fast as you'd expect, the Apple just wasn't fast at all. Today when I got to work for the first time in ages I noticed that accessing my RedHat Enterprise Samba server is fast, so tonight I upgraded my Samba's at home to version 3 and that fixed it.
So if your OS X is performing slow to Samba servers, make sure you are on the 3 branch of Samba.
UPDATE: After this I was still having some issues, especially with very slow read performance.
I came across this post on macosxhints and figured I'd give it a try, sorted, reading and writing is much faster now.
This didn't work for me, but setting the sysctl parameter net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack to 0 did! For me, the results were dramatic: drag-and-drop of a 100MB .wav file from the samba server took 45 minutes before the fix, and < 2 minutes after the fix. Wahoooo!
Found the info here: http://julipedia.blogspot.com/2006/02/samba-performance-under-mac-os-x.html
[in case that link vanishes, here's the short version:
use 'sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0' on command-line to try it (persistent until reboot) and put the line
'net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0' in /etc/sysctl.conf to fix it 'permanently' -- note: I haven't tested the latter yet. I had to create the sysctl.conf file, and haven't rebooted yet]
and a good discussion of *why* it works, starts at the bottom of that same blog entry, then links to the crux of the problem here:
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-net/2003/01/28/0004.html
[It's a TCP bug inherited from the FreeBSD stack - the same bug was fixed in NetBSD back in 1997, and Apple has known about it since before Jaguar release]
Apologies for the lack of formatting - couldn't figure out how to get paragraph spacing on this blog.
Hi!
What version fo Mac OS X do you have?
We’re interested on this to recommend it as a tip to our user group (Amahi Linux Home Server).
I experience some delays when selecting access to my Amahi LHS, something like 3 seconds to “connect”. Performance is ok, though it seems slow, so I wanted to try it.
So far we have tried it with 10.5.1, however, the difference is not noticeable with a value of 0.
The previous value was 3. We set it to 0.
HOWEVER, we tried with a different machine, with 10.5.2 in it, and it was very snappy!
Carlos