Slow Speeds Accessing Shares From a Mac

[santacruzskim]

I have a WHS 2011 box with no special networking-related settings going on. Accessing shares on all the PCs in my house get around 100MB/s read and write. All macs are getting around 25MB/s.  Tried mounting shared volumes as cifs and smb.  I've found a few forums of people reporting the same with various forms of windows servers and though there are 100 hack-y suggestions, nothing has ever worked for me.

 

Anyone have any ideas on what I could do to improve performance? If i can't get this working well, it'll mean a lot of buying decisions, completely reworking my network storage.

Edited November 4, 2016 by santacruzskim

[santacruzskim]

Ended up improving speeds to a manageable place around 60-80MB's by diving deeper into the resources I had saved from my previous attempts at solving this. Adding my notes below in case anyone runs into the same issues.

 

++++++++++++++++

1. Stop generating .ds_store files, as outlined here
2. Choose the right SMB Version. There's 1, 2, 3, 3.x and a few others in between.  WS 2008r2 only supports up to SMB2. Starting with MacOS 10.10, they support up to SMB3. Each version supports faster speeds and other doodads, but supposedly SMB2 is the least reliable, hanging and disconnecting and so on when used in this WinServe - MacClient configuration:
   1. The OS will default to either how you connect (cifs:// (SMB1) vs smb:// (SMB2)) or SMB2, unless it thinks it should do otherwise. However, if you do the following, you can force it to use whichever method you'd like.
      1. In /Users/Eric/Library/Preferences create the following file: nsmb.conf
      2. Using TextEdit, add the following, line-by-line [1] [2]
         1. [default]
         2. smb_neg=smb2_only
      3. If that doesn't work, you can try typing the following into the terminal which will create the proper file with the text inside, properly formatted:
         1. echo "[default]" >> ~/Library/Preferences/nsmb.conf; echo "smb_neg=smb2_only" >> ~/Library/Preferences/nsmb.conf
3. You can disable signing which supposedly improves speed, but lowers security (who cares, its my network). Add the following lines to the nsmb.conf file:
   1. [default]
   2. signing_required=no
   3. (If that doesn't work you can try entering the following in the terminal [1])
      1. printf "[default]\nsigning_required=no\n" | sudo tee /etc/nsmb.conf >/dev/null

 

TIPS / NOTES

1. To figure out info on how a currently mounted volume is communicating with the client, enter the following in the terminal:
   1. (for specific share) smbutil statshares -m /Volumes/<name of share>
   2. (to list all shares) smbutil statshares -a
2. For any changes to take effect, you have to unmount and remount any shares
3. Removing the "nsmb.conf" file will reset any parameters set in that file to the OS defaults.
4. Putting the "nsmb.conf" file in your /etc folder will apply settings to the boot disk, regardless of user.
5. Something crazy to try if you get desperate (which I have not tried yet)
6. Another Crazy Idea:

Pascal Herms on October 29, 2015 at 9:03 AM

Not sure if this still is an issue or not, but I have had similar issues with Mac computers connecting to windows servers.  What I did was change some settings on the mac clients. I edited /etc/sysctl.conf and added the following lines to it:

net.inet.tcp.win_scale_factor=8

net.inet.tcp.autorcvbufmax=16777216

net.inet.tcp.autosndbufmax=16777216

Hope this helps.

[roh008]

Thanks for the heads up. Those speeds you quoted for file transfer, what network set up do you have as 100MB/s is very very good. Is it a gigabyte LAN with SSDs?

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[santacruzskim]

I do video post production so file access and transfers are almost always of the large, LARGE file size variant; many smaller files being transferred go much slower.  Nothing special on the network.  I do mostly reads for my work as the server only stores the raw camera files, with everything else being on local ssd's and raided spinning disk.  Server is a TS140 with all work storage coming off a Norco DS24e over SAS. I use stablebit drivepool for redundancy, but it also helps increase read speeds.

 

hope that helps.

 

-eric

[ShadowPeo]

Thanks for the info, I just skimmed it but have tagged it as a potential resource