Performance CIFS/NCP on Windows 7

Last week I got a email from Alex Peeters. A couple of months ago he followed the N3089 who I gave.
Alex did some testing with CIFS and NCP performance on Windows 7 what is quite interesting. I’m glad that I can publish his results.
Nice job Alex, keep up the good work!

From Alex:

I’ve been reading, testing and tweaking file transfer performance on different WAN links.

My test:

Use a WAN link with a 1 GB throughput and a high latency of 15 ms. I’ve measured the time it takes to copy a 580MB file from the server down to the workstation. From that i have deducted the actual throughput. The server is an HP Proliant DL380G5.

Test 1A: NCP

Server: NetWare 6.5 SP 7 with a 1GB NIC.

Client: Windows XP 100 MB NIC with a Novell Client

Actual throughput: 21.04 Mb/s

Test 1B: NCP

Server: NetWare 6.5 SP 7 with a 1GB NIC.

Client: Windows 7 Beta 100 MB NIC without Novell Client

Actual throughput: 22.56 Mb/s

Test 2A: CIFS on NetWare

Server: NetWare 6.5 SP 7 with a 1GB NIC.

Client: Windows XP 100 MB NIC without Novell Client

Actual throughput: 24.16 Mb/s

Test 2B: CIFS on NetWare

Server: NetWare 6.5 SP 7 with a 1GB NIC.

Client: Windows 7 Beta 100 MB NIC without Novell Client

Actual throughput: 65.16 Mb/s

Test 3A: CIFS on Windows 2003

Server: Windows 2003 with a 1GB NIC.

Client: Windows XP 100 MB NIC without Novell Client

Actual throughput: 21.09 Mb/s

Test 3B: CIFS on Windows 2003

Server: Windows 2003 with a 1GB NIC.

Client: Windows 7 Beta 100 MB NIC without Novell Client

Actual throughput: 64.44 Mb/s

It seems to me that M$ has done something to Windows 7 that makes it outperform NCP. I have read something about SMB2 but I’m not sure how that would fit in my test results.

Is there a way I can tweak my OES2 server (NetWare of Linux) or Novell Client to match the CIFS performance on NCP?