Abysmal samba performance

[kamagurka]

Following setup: Gentoo boxen with physical connection to router and samba running; Windows lappy on wlan trying to suck data from the boxen.
Now samba performance is terrible. I was expecting to be able to watch videos directly from the shares, but I can't even listen to mp3s without having them skip all over the place. I have no idea how to troubleshoot this and what there is to do. Any suggestions?
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[Jeremy_Z]

Check your network first before blaming samba.

You use wlan, performance can be very variable, test with cables first.
With cable check the link speed, be sure your server and your client are connected with 100Mbit, check they have the same Half/Full duplex settings (and be sure your router is setup correctly for that), else you can force 100Mbit Half Duplex on both boxes.

If you still suspect Samba, be sure you don't have some misconfiguration (like playing with the socket options in smb.conf, default settings are OK, changing them can result in performance lose) setup a ftp server on the linux box and compare the transfer speed.
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