I have a file server running Ubuntu 12.04 and Samba 3.6.3. A Samba share is mapped to a drive on a Windows 8 machine.
When copying a test file to a local drive (which is an SSD and not a bottleneck here), it is very slow when doing so through Explorer. It is similarly slow when downloading the file through Internet Explorer. When downloading through Firefox (by entering the file URI), however, it is more than 10x as fast, as the image below shows.
What's going on here? I know that Samba is not fast, but I thought that's generally the case when dealing with lots of small files, when its request logic is very inefficient. The test file was 826 MB.