Do the other processes do much disk IO? Maybe it's your disk that can't keep up. Nice doesn't have much effect when a process uses up all the disk IO. If you have multiple disks, you could try moving files around such that the files being served by smb are on a different disk that the others (and also a different disk than the system install) Dan -- **************************** Daniel Armbrust Biomedical Informatics Mayo Clinic Rochester daniel.armbrust(at)mayo.edu http://informatics.mayo.edu/