Looking for approaches to track down source of performance issues

A group generates data on a Unix system. The group members have the folder where the data resides mapped to a drive on their WIndows 7 desktop.

They then have tried uploading the data to a SharePoint document library (actually to a location that is 2 folders deep within a SharePoint library).

They have tried both using the document upload function, as well as an Explorer view of the folder and dragging and dropping documents.

In the test data, there are 25 files across 14 folders, amounting to approximately 10 megabytes of data.

During their testing, the copy took 25 minutes to complete.

Copying the same amount of data on Unix took only a few minutes.

They have turned to the SharePoint admins asking whether there is anything that can be done to improve the copy process.

We don't get a lot of complaints of this nature. I don't know whether there is something specific to this site that is going on, or if it is a general problem and people have not been reporting it.

What tools would help determine where a performance hit of 25 times slower is taking place? 

If a user is on their desktop, and they open a sharepoint site up within a browser on their desktop and then use the upload multiple documents function and specify 14 folders located on a mapped drive, do the files first get copied to the desktop, and then to the sharepoint server, and finally to the sharepoint sql server?

Or do they go directly from the mapped drive to the sql server?

Or some other path of which I am not aware?

Thank you