All right, having some slight Samba performance issues and I am starting to wonder if it's more of my hardware versus settings in the config file. Let me explain the issue I am having.

Basically my Linux computer acts as my file and media server. Sometimes what I will do is pull up a big list of my MP3's and listen to them while I am doing things. It will play them fine for a while, then one of em will start skipping. Eventually the skipping subsides and it resumes like normal. NOW, here as of recent, I have also been doing some studying for the CCNA and I have stored the CCNA (Academy) curriculum on my server. When I view it and listen to my music, the skipping becomes more frequent...and sometimes the curriculum will freeze a tad when I'm going to the next page. Eventually it will subside and resume like normal. Here are my socket option settings of my smb.conf file:

socket options = IPTOS_LOWDELAY TCP_NODELAY SO_KEEPALIVE SO_RCVBUF=4096 SO_SNDBUF=4096

I have tweaked the buffers a lot and for some reason, the lower they are the better. In terms of hardware, well it's nothing impressive but it works: 1Ghz PIII, 192MB RAM, 7200RPM 80GB HD.

I am really thinking that I need a tad more power (particularly more RAM). Do you all think it's hardware or is there something possibly in smb.conf I could add to help some?

Well, if you posted your smb.conf file that would help a lot. Also, do a hard drive performance test by typing the command:
Substitute /dev/hda for the path to the driver file of the partition you want to test, then post that as well. Also, run the following commands and post the output.
Check out ps -a to see how many processes you have running. I bet that your ram is the biggest slow down on your computer, so you might want to look into upgrading your system to at least 512MB. Do those things and we might be able to see what is slowing down your computer.

crashsystems

Uh, I've got a K6-3 450 with 192MB of RAM doing more than that and the MP3's never hiccup, nor do the movies that I watch directly off the server. The MP3's don't even skip when I'm moving massive (IE, hundreds of megs to a gig) worth of data to and from the server. I mean, it's doing IRC, Shoutcast encode and casting, file server/dc for 4 computers. The utilization on that thing is always at least sitting at 50% if not higher due to the shoutcast, and neither shoutcast or the mp3/video streaming on the home network hiccups. The only time I got a hiccup (and it was a hellacious one) was when I enabled ClamAV scanning on it. Woops. :-P

The only thing I MIGHT think would be the problem would be, what kind of NIC are you using? Hard drive speed? Stuff like that. Or, what type of switch are you using? A P3 1GHz should be able to handle that load with 128MB of RAM no issue.