AMD64 Machine, Suse 9.2 distro Samba 3.0.22-0.1.10 The below matter has also been submitted to Kernel.org After upgrading from a Vanilla 2.6.15.1 (from stable tree) to 2.6.16 (from kernel.org) a problem developed with the Samba/Vmware 4.5.2 networking. The network is almost unuseable it is that slow. I tried upgrading Samba. I tried alterations to smb.conf. I tried many things to resolve the issue. When I booted back into kernel 2.6.15.1 on the same machine with the same software the problem vanished. I then tried to mirror these network settings in the 2.6.16 .config file - and recompiled. But not luck. The new kernel still exhibits this problem. I could not find any kernel logs or Samba logs that throw light on the matter.
This sounds like a kernel bug only. If you change the kernel and the system perfoamnce goes down, there's not much a user space application like Samba can do about it. No need to track here.