For those running OS X 10.3 on legacy hardware, this tip might solve your Samba performance issues. The OS 10.3 install was a breeze (using XpostFacto 3.0 and an install of OS 9.1). The aim of putting this modern OS on such old hardware was to run a personal web, file, and printer server. I knew 10.3 client could handle these tasks easily. But I immediately ran into problems with Samba. Specifically, no matter what I tried, the write performance (to the Beige G3's hosted shares) was a terrible 100-300KB/s. sftp performance was pretty good, as was scp. But I wanted Samba!
Digging through the man smb.conf help pages, I came accross this option: large readwrite. The man page clearly stated that this was the default setting. However, a 64bit capable kernel/OS is needed! So I set large readwrite = no in the smb.conf file, restarted the deamon, and bingo!
I now am able to juice the Beige box from my XP and OS X clients. Performance is great:
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2005030318025158