File Transfer Speed over WAN Way better with Windows. Why?

[woodyak]

Here is what I have. 2010 Mac Airbook running OSX 10.8.2 connecting to a Windows2003 SP2 server over a good WAN connection (site to site VPN over a 25/10MB Internet connection). I'm also running Win7 and Win8 via Parallels 7 on this Airbook. When I transfer a 256MB file to my Windows server using OSX it takes about 5 minutes. When I transfer this same file to the same server using Win7 or Win8 via Parallels it takes less than a minute. I also find browsing file shares to be very quick with the Windows instances but quite painful with OSX. What gives? Are there any settings in OSX that could help speed things up?

 

[freejazz-man]

I wish - it seems a lot of the sharing protocols on OSX leave a lot to be desired.

What are you using? AFP, CIFS, NFS?

 

[woodyak]

CIFS.

Yeah, it's a big bummer. I have to open up Parrallels or RDP into a Win box anytime I want to do basic file transfers or when I try to browse WAN shares. Oh well.

 

[freejazz-man]

5 minutes for 256 MB seems a bit much - is the network slow aside from that?

I've found that CIFS can be especially slow when you are doing a mac -> windows as opposed to using CIFs to connect to a NAS. You might want to try NFS, it's tricker, but more stable once working and should result in much higher speeds.

 

[switon]

Re: NFS ...

5 minutes for 256 MB seems a bit much - is the network slow aside from that?

I've found that CIFS can be especially slow when you are doing a mac -> windows as opposed to using CIFs to connect to a NAS. You might want to try NFS, it's tricker, but more stable once working and should result in much higher speeds.

Hi guys,

I concur, in my experience CIFS is very slow when going Apple -> Windows, but NFS is much faster and you can tune NFS to perform even better.

Regards,
Switon