SMB / CIFS slow versys NFS

I've a NAS filesystem with about 9,000,000 files and a total size of
about 4 Terrabyte. And came to some strange conclusions :


CIFS Copy slow
- When copying folders to another network server, the copy is slow,
certenly if the folder contains many small files (less then 1 kb) .
- When I do the same copy using NFS, the copy time is half the time
compared to the CIFS copy

List folders slow using CIFS
- When I wan't a list of all files on the system and I use the command
'DIR /S /B > c:\file.txt' on a Windows XP SP2 client, it takes about 14
hours to complete.
- When I do the same list from a Linux Sambaclient it takes only 4
hours.
- When I do it using a Linux client and a NFS mount it only takes about
15 minutes

To be sure these result didn't have anything to do with the NAS box, I
copied a lot of files to a Windows 2003 SP1 server and compared the
copy time with the copy time of the NAS. The results where about the
same, of course I couldn't test using NFS.
I did the same for the list folders problem and also here I got the
same results. The sambaclient was also here 3 times faster over CIFS
compared to the windows XP client.

Btw, the linux client with the sambaclient on it was a VM running on a
Windows XP box.


Anybody an idea how I can speed up the CIFS copies and file queries?