I was transferring files from my xubuntu computer, to my Windows 8 computer, using Samba, when I noticed the speeds were much slower than I remembered.

This lead me to test out my LAN speeds.
I used this nice program I found called netio.
I did several tests.

Windows to Linux using TCP: ~1180KB/s
Windows to Linux using UDP: ~11MB/s
Linux to Windows using TCP: ~1160KB/s
Linux to Windows using UDP: ~11MB/s
Windows to Windows using TCP: ~11MB/s
Windows to Windows using UDP: ~11MB/s
Linux to Linux using TCP: ~11MB/s
Linux to Linux using UDP: ~11MB/s

I used several computers to test all this.
The main computers I'm concerned about, have Windows 8, and xubuntu 14.10. I also used other computers with lubuntu 14.10 and Windows XP, and Windows 7.

The TCP speeds between Windows and Linux are slow.
Using SCP, Samba, and of course the netio progam, all gave around the same results, ~1MB/s

I can't understand what's going on.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

If nothing else, is there a way to transfer files using UDP?

You can use NetCat (nc) utility on linux and start a udp port for file transfer.

Thanks

add this to samba.conf and see if it helps.

I added the edits to my smb.conf like jlcostinha suggested, but it did not provide an improvement.
When researching the samba side, everything I turned up said setting socket options is better left up to the kernel.

I was able to get netcat to work, but it is definitely not an ideal solution.
When using UDP, you're unable to tell when a file has finished transferring.

Thanks for the help jlcostinha and vishesh.

Look at system loads. May have to set checksum offload to card if cpu use is high.

Do other tests too. Use ftp from source maybe.

I ran top while running netio in a different GNU Screen.
CPU usage was ~1%
I thought maybe this could be a factor, since this is a quite old computer.
AMD Athlon XP 2900+, at 2GHz with 2GB DDR

I'm not that great when it comes to Linux stuff, but after researching I tried disabling tx offloading just to see if it would help.
When I ran:
I got:
I tried setting up an FTP server on the xubuntu computer, and the results were the same.
~1MB/s

I keep thinking that Linux is the problem, but maybe instead Windows is some how the problem.
I still can not understand why speeds to/from the xubuntu computer are fine with another linux OS,
but TCP with Windows is slow. I'm going to try an older version of Ubuntu and maybe other distros and see if it has anything to do with me upgrading to Ubuntu Utopic 14.10.

--EDIT--
Well, I feel like quite an idiot.
I did a reset of all the routers in the environment, and sure enough everything is working fine now.
I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier.
I'll close this thread now.

Thanks again for the help everyone.

Thanks for the update and solution.

Interesting solution too. I would not have guessed it right off but now that you mention it's a good idea.

UDP is stateless. Every packet is sent with the "hope" that it will arrive. TCP is stateful and performs checks to ensure that the data arrives correctly. I've seen transfer speeds go through the floor when one machine has a duplex mismatch between its NIC and the switch. Resetting your network likely fixed this issue.