FTP: Samba tunnels through Entunnel

[jknightcs1]

Hi,
I emailed van dyke's support about this issue, and they told me it has been put into their bug database for review, but they didn't have a real solution yet. I'm posting the email here in the hopes one of you may have some ideas:

We use entunnel to create secure samba shares from several database servers to a secure FTP server. Our clients then log directly onto these tunneled samba shares to retrieve files that we create for them.
Recently, we've seen a lot of slowness on this system, particularly when there are a lot of file in a folder, but especially when there are a lot of permissions within a folder as well (ie, a user has access to some user folders in a /users folder, but not everyone. When they try to go into /users, it takes a long time for folders to come up, sometimes much too long). We can't find any networking bottlenecks between the database servers and FTP server, and we've tried different FTP clients to no avail, so we're beginning to think this has something to do with the secure samba connection. Any ideas? Are there ways to tweak these connections even more than your instructions show in order to increase performance?
Thanks for any insight.