Copying files off Samba Server - freezes/very slow

[Gareth Bailey]

I have just upgraded the hardware of our development server. I thought
that our file server used to be slow due to slow hardware, but now
that we have upgraded I am a bit puzzled.

Samba seems to slow or hang (top reports smbd CPU usage as 40%) when
files are copied off the server using windows explorer on the client.

Can anyone sugeest a reason for this behaviour?

Thanks,
Gareth