'Server' performance mode, still valid?

[panjandrum]

I currently run a couple Sierra servers (last real Server version basically) for Time Machine backups and file-serving, and CCC also runs network clones of staff machines, and a network Media server (UPNP & DLNA) as well, and I set them to so-called 'Server Performance Mode' years ago and never really thought about it again. I have never had to reset NVRAM on either one, so they are both sitting there happily churning away doing what they do. I don't *really* know if that mode has helped at all, or if our needs are so light that it's fundamentally made no difference whatsoever.

Anyway, with the changes to Time Machine it looks like my best bet is probably to move to a 'server' (*cough* *cough*) running Big Sur, which means just Big Sur with the correct sharing setup, to an APFS drive since all the staff machines backing up to it will be moving to Big Sur soon. It might eventually make sense to migrate our File Sharing resources to APFS drives as well, as I'm guessing that at some point in the relatively near future Apple's going to break support for connecting to anything hosted on non-APFS volumes (although, I sure hope they don't!)

Just curious if anyone knows if those boot-args do anything at all for recent MacOS versions? I've Google repeatedly but find zero information much more specific than "El Capitan and Later," which I don't trust to be accurate.

 

[hobowankenobi]

I expect support for external (non-boot) HFS+ to stay around for the foreseeable future. As I understand it, nearly all the benefits of APFS are only applicable to boot volumes. Besides that, APFS is the least cross-platform file system, and is harder to recover data from, especially to any other platform.

When (if?) Apple folds in most of the portability and flexibility of HFS+ to APFS, then I would worry the clock is ticking.

As for Server Performance mode...

As it is part of EFI, and new Apple hardware does not use EFI, the clock is ticking on this. Since most services have been stripped out of Server for a few iterations now, I would be skeptical if it actually does anything on later OSes. That all depends on what services it is prioritizing. I doubt AFP and SMB were ever helped, but I can't say. Maybe still useful for Profile Manager?