With Apple's awesome support for software RAID, my main fileserver is now on an OS X box (sometimes even my iBook!). I occasionally notice big latency when opening directories or saving files from a Windows box via SMB. After some investigation, I found that tuning Samba a little has greatly improved this. Put the following in the [global] section of /etc/smb.conf:
read size = 1024<br>
socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_KEEPALIVE
SO_RCVBUF=2048 SO_SNDBUF=2048 IPTOS_LOWDELAY<br>
getwd cache = yes<br>
Note: The socket options entry is shown on two lines; enter it as one long line. And, of course, restart smbd with a -HUP> signal or your prefered method when you're done editing.Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040324053434397