[TriLUG] Samba vs NFS -- Speed difference, why?

[John Broome]

I have a RH 9 machine that is acting as a fileserver for a completly
windows network (98 & 2000), the users mentioned that the file
transfers seemed slow.

Some testing showed that samba was moving data much slower than NFS. 
Nfs was using pretty much the entire speed potential of the network,
where SMB was about half that, or less.

No indication on the server that CPU, HDD, or memory is the problem.

When tested off site with different hardware and a different OS
(Ubuntu 5.04), the same problem popped up.

SMB dragging along, NFS cranking.

Since this is a mostly windows network we can't really use NFS instead
of the samba.

Has anyone else run into this?  Some googling doesn't really turn up much.