Extreeeemely slow copy to a folder with a lot of contents...?

[carlsson]

Setup:
- Windows 2012 r2 server
- Connected with SMB from a Mac with 10.10.1.
- One of the folders on the server contains 24.000 files (it's for a database).

Problem:
- Copy something to that folder takes extremely long time. For 5 MB it's more than 5 minutes. Copy on other folders is normal (ie seconds).

I know that SMB and Mac OS X is not best buddies, but this sounds ridiculous...?!

Any ideas?

 

[xgman]

Not unusual. Only help would be a faster drive. Lots of small files are always going to be the slowest speed action on a drive.

 

[leman]

SMB is actually the default file-sharing protocol on OS X (yeah, I know)

But in all seriousness, I haven't experienced anything like that. I don't have a Windows server (my server is a Mac running Yosemite and Server 4.0), but there are no noticeable performance issues with SMB and shares with large number of files. One of my shares has over 16000 files on it and the operations are still plenty fast. Or do you mean that you have all the files in the same folder, without any subdirectories? I can imagine plenty of reasons why that could be slow...

 

[AlanShutko]

It seems that the SMB protocol has performance problems when there are a lot of files in the same directory. Here's a discussion: http://serverfault.com/questions/38992/max-practical-files-per-folder-on-a-windows-file-share

 

[carlsson]

Thanks for the answers!

We just did an upgrade from Windows Server 2008, and this problem was not noticable before.

I can open the folder pretty fast, but when copying objects into it, it grinds to a halt. I don't see the logic?

...and this is a Mac issue. Doing the same thing on a Windows machine is *blazing* fast (a 3 GB folder took 1 minute to copy)...!