Troubleshooting Slow Transfer Speed Between Linux Box and Windows Box
 

Since this has elements of hardware, networking, and software involved, I figured that the general forum would be an appropriate place to post my question. So, here it goes.

I have SUSE 10.0 Box setup with Samba, and I have a Windows XP Home box. I have been trying to backup my Windows documents drive, dedicated to My Documents folder, to my Linux box. The transfer has been going very slowly. In fact, only 16GB were transferred in 9 hours. I'm thinking that this has something to do with Suse 10.0, because I previously had no speed problems when the Linux box was running Fedora 4 and Suse 9.3.

Both boxes are fairly fast(x64 3200+ and XP 2800+), with plenty of RAM (1GB each), gigabit network cards, and SATA hard drives. They are connected through a router that has done the transfer many times before at fast speeds.

Any ideas? Is there a way that I can identify a bottleneck? Thank you.

Check the results of "ifconfig -a" and see if your Ethernet interface is showing errors or dropped packets or the like. Also you can check the load on both systems, particularly I/O load (use iostat in Linux -- maybe one of the sysinternals can help you on Windows but not sure). If all else fails, try using a packet sniffer like Ethereal on the Linux box and see if you notice any oddities (excessive numbers of duplicate acks, etc.). Problems like this can be very tricky to track down, so good luck.