File I/O Optimizations

[Randy Grafton]

I've got a few FreeBSD boxes running SAMBA as file servers on our LAN.
Our client workstations are all Windows OS's including 98SE, Win2K and WinXP
Pro. 
I've been looking long and hard for ways to improve the I/O of networked
hosted files. 
Our utilizations of the servers vary from  a few large, (~700MB), files that
need to be
moved around to a ton, (~80,000), small files, (~30KB). Our directory
structure is pretty
well maintained in that the nesting of files and folders does not get very
deep, (maybe
6). The number of users per server rarely exceeds 50. Our problem is that
when files/
folders are being copied across the network for burning onto DVD or CD, that
the CPU
utilization on those servers rockets up leaving the server at maybe 1% to 2%
idle and
overall performance of the server is weak/slow. Could someone provide some
advice or
suggestions for fine tuning the configurations of the servers. We're running
FreeBSD 4.8,
SAMBA 2.2.8a. The host hardware is P3 or P4 CPU's with 512MB to 2GB of RAM
and 3Ware
Escalade RAID cards with 3 to 4 7200RPM, 200MB hard drives with 8MB of drive
cache
running in a RAID 5. The servers are also outfitted with Intel gigabit
Ethernet.

My current SAMBA configs include the following general settings:
oplocks=no
level2 oplocks=no
socket options=TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_KEEPALIVE SO_RCVBUF=8192
SO_SNDBUF=8192

I've not made any special configurations for the OS or kernel.

Thanks,
-Randy