SMB vs AFP - which to use and why are they so slow?

[jonahj]

Solution

For those of you who have experienced slow browsing and copying to/from a windows server, here's a link to the solution:

http://www.macwindows.com/snowleopard-filesharing.html#091709k


Basically, open a terminal window and enter the following command:

"sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0"

Values you can try are 0-3.

The original setting is ack=3

I've found that a value of 0 for my wired Imac and a value of 1 for my wireless Macbook and Macbook Pro gave me the best performance

To make the setting "stick" through a reboot, you need to edit the /etc/sysctl.conf file by adding net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0 or whatever value you select to it.

To edit and/or create sysctl.conf, do the following in the terminal window:

type "sudo vi /etc/sysctl.conf"
You will then be prompted to enter your admin password.
Once in the vi editor, hit "i" for insert and enter the command i mention before.
Once entered, hit the "esc" key and enter ":q". This will save the file and exit the editor.

You're now set.


HTH

 

[pacha2]

Thank You so much for the solution I was attempting to copy a large file (4gb) from my Qnap NAS TS-410 to the my MacBook Air with Leopard on it.

Initially it said 8 hours! After making the change above with a value of 0 this was reduced to 20 minutes. This is using a wired USB LAN cable.

This issue for me does not occur when copying from my XP machine or when copying to the NAS. It only occured copying from the NAS with all protocols (AFP, SMB & NFS).

Thanks once again it is much appreciated.

 

[soulreaver99]

Old thread but finally decided to google the solution to the problem and found this! Thank you so much!

 

[maflynn]

Changing the sysctl value did not seem to impact AFP performance, so this setting may be only improving SMB.

 

[xgman]

Very old thread, but on Lion and an Iomega ix2-200 cloud edition NAS, it is so painfully slow as to be unusable whereas on the same mac pro in windows 7 drive it is very fast as expected. The terminal edit above did not help, however once each folder is accessed once and reopended, the speed picks up only for that folder. Then if you unmount the NAS and re-mount it, the slow is back. Extremely slow! MU Commander is almost as fast as windows compared to Finder, Pathfinder etc, which are all basically unusable.

What are people doing to use NAS storage on the Mac? I don't get it.

 

[pacha2]

I resorted to Filezilla and FTP to backup my Photos and Videos. FTP seems to be by far the fastest and most reliable method of copying a large amount of data in many files across to my NAS.

I tired using SMB, NFS and AFP, all connected and worked to some extent but never performed particularly well or reliably.

 

[robb1068]

Modify smb.conf file?

Have you tried updating the smb.conf file?

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110430173901534

This has helped us out with -50 errors and speeds up folder access via smb. Needs to be reapplied after an OS update.

 

[hibernian56]

Speed checks

Very old thread, but on Lion and an Iomega ix2-200 cloud edition NAS....

What are people doing to use NAS storage on the Mac? I don't get it.

@xqman, what sort of NAS drive is it, new or old? I have a ReadyNAS and get around 26.7MB/s write, 30MB/s read on all my macs... Didn't check my PC (I just use it for AutoCAD, Solidworks and iTunes installed, I try to keep it minimum as you know how bloated PC's get very fast)

A few thing to check, the obvious first;
is the cable a good quality CAT5e / 6?
Are IP / DNS set up correctly?
A simple but effective test is to "direct connect" to the NAS to remove any doubts about network problems, by doing this you should get top speed, if not then there is something wrong with either the NAS or Mac configuration.

If these are ok, one of the best things you can do is enable Jumbo frames;
Open System Preferences > Network > Ethernet > Advanced (button) > Ethernet (tab). You will see a setting for MTU, by default its set at 1500, change it to 9000 (max) and see the difference.

NOTE: You must have Jumbo frames enabled on your NAS for this to work.

Another thing you might want to change is to stop those annoying .ds_store files, they offer little benefit to a NAS drive;
Open Terminal and execute this command:
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

Either restart the computer or log out and back in to the user account.
If you want to prevent .DS_Store file creation for other users on the same computer, log in to each user account and perform the steps above—or distribute a copy of the newly modified com.apple.desktopservices.plist file to the ~/Library/Preferences folder of other user accounts.

 

[freelermarc]

AFP and SAMBA super fast after disabling finder pop

I had the same slow performance issues of QNAP NAS on iMAC as others, both with AFP and SAMBA. On win7 and XP machines, performance was great. After trying about every suggestion that helped others, but did not help me, I almost gave up. Then I figured that maybe another app could slow down finder performance and realized that finderpop may be the party killer. I disabled it and was rewarded with a incredible performance boost

 

[MuggeGHQ]

I had the same slow performance issues of QNAP NAS on iMAC as others, both with AFP and SAMBA. On win7 and XP machines, performance was great. After trying about every suggestion that helped others, but did not help me, I almost gave up. Then I figured that maybe another app could slow down finder performance and realized that finderpop may be the party killer. I disabled it and was rewarded with a incredible performance boost

Hi man. What is finderpop ???