Is it just me, network drives are slow?

[keogh]

Hey Guys,

Ok I have felt like this ever Since Tiger (when I first started using Mac), but dealing with network drives (viewing, copying, deleting of files and folders etc) is painfully slow at times.

If I connect my drive via smb or afp it's slow and quite frustrating at times. I won't even go near afp, that is a joke on folders with many files, I can literally be waiting 3 to 4 minutes for a listing to appear which is unacceptable. smb is a lot better but still slower.

Now if I didn't also use Windows every day I prob wouldn't notice, but Windows blows OS X out the water when it comes to this. Everything is pretty much instant (to a degree) and I have no issues there at all.

The network drives btw are not Windows servers, they are Ubuntu and other forms of *nix drives, so in my head OS X should talk to them easier.

Am I connecting to these drives correctly? How do you connect to them? I simply Go > Connect to Server > smb://bla/bla. I actually wrote a small AppleScript that does this for me, and I drag that in to my login items, but it's the same principal.

Is there a faster protocol I could use to talk to these servers? Or is smb the preferred? I hear that Mavericks (which I am on) uses smb2 (smbx) does smb:// go over this? Or do I need to specify this... maybe that would speed things up?

Love to know your thoughts on this, cos if Windows 8.1 can talk to a Debian machine fast, then I think OS X has no excuses.

Thanks guys

 

[satcomer]

Hey Guys,

Ok I have felt like this ever Since Tiger (when I first started using Mac), but dealing with network drives (viewing, copying, deleting of files and folders etc) is painfully slow at times.

If I connect my drive via smb or afp it's slow and quite frustrating at times. I won't even go near afp, that is a joke on folders with many files, I can literally be waiting 3 to 4 minutes for a listing to appear which is unacceptable. smb is a lot better but still slower.

Now if I didn't also use Windows every day I prob wouldn't notice, but Windows blows OS X out the water when it comes to this. Everything is pretty much instant (to a degree) and I have no issues there at all.

The network drives btw are not Windows servers, they are Ubuntu and other forms of *nix drives, so in my head OS X should talk to them easier.

Am I connecting to these drives correctly? How do you connect to them? I simply Go > Connect to Server > smb://bla/bla. I actually wrote a small AppleScript that does this for me, and I drag that in to my login items, but it's the same principal.

Is there a faster protocol I could use to talk to these servers? Or is smb the preferred? I hear that Mavericks (which I am on) uses smb2 (smbx) does smb:// go over this? Or do I need to specify this... maybe that would speed things up?

Love to know your thoughts on this, cos if Windows 8.1 can talk to a Debian machine fast, then I think OS X has no excuses.

Thanks guys

In mavericks if you are connecting to Windows share that is setup right and such then try cifs://ipaddress/share/ instead and see if that works quicker.

 

[keogh]

Thanks satcomer, however I'm not connecting to a Windows server at all, just to Linux boxes.

From my understanding, cifs:// will revert to SMBv1 and smb:// will use the newer smbv2 (smbx). I had a play with both and can't seem to see a difference in speed to be honest, so will stick with smb:// I think.

Seems to me this is just how OS X is with it's networking between servers, a bit laggy and won't compete with Windows in that department I don't think.

 

[ScoobyMcDoo]

If you do a google search with the terms 'osx smb slow' you will find multiple threads with lots of remedies along with comments about how well they worked or did not work for different folks.

 

[.X.]

Since you're connecting to Ubuntu and other Unix-like systems, it would make sense to try NFS instead of SMB.