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Mac OS X incredible slow on network drives??

L

Lars Petersen

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 3, 2005
25
0
Hello all,

I post this in the Mac Basics and Help. I am pretty sure that this is just some setting somewhere that needs to be set. Otherwise it would be too crazy.

Now networking is pretty popular these days, better backup possibilities and off cause much more space.

I only have 250GB's in my Mac.

When I work with pictures from cameras I save them in folders on a network drive for others to use as well. It is a windows network but that should not make any different? Why on earth is the Mac so slow? Just showing the thumbnails in one single folder takes for ever? One of the folders contains about 200 images, so it isn't even that crazy? When I try to open or even just copy one single image it takes forever? I have to use my windows machine to see which pictures to open so I don’t have to waste minutes opening the wrong ones.

What can I do? I can't possible be the only one with these problems?

Thanks in advance,

Lars Petersen
 
I have the same problems... I was told to use something called Bandwidth Optimizer but all that did was speed up my Internet Browsing to a small degree.

Could someone possibly have a real fix? I do not know.. but don't listen to those who think the problem is related to tweaking your MTU settings.
 
i have exactly the same prolems too, i have just asked the IT bod and he informs me the network drive is a NTFS formatted drive
 
It is a normal windows network. Windows server 2003, filesystem is NTFS, as it would typically be in 90% of all normal networks, i can read and write just as a Windows computer, the real differents is the speed. It is so slow that it is almost useless. I can't really believe the Mac's are best at working locally?
 
Are you connected to the shared volumes via SMB?

I haven't really tested SMB speeds, but it wouldn't surprise me one bit that SMB on Mac OS X is pretty slow.....

No problems with AFP though. Maybe you try a test using AFP sharing?
 
MacsRgr8 said:
Are you connected to the shared volumes via SMB?

I haven't really tested SMB speeds, but it wouldn't surprise me one bit that SMB on Mac OS X is pretty slow.....

No problems with AFP though. Maybe you try a test using AFP sharing?
Click to expand...
My home directory at work is an automouted SMB drive. It's lightning fast. I get 2-3 MB/s connecting to it via the network.

The file format shouldn't matter if it's shared properly.
 
Mine is automounted SMB drives/folders as well. How strange? Can I turn some settings off perhaps? Maybe there are some settings which uses a lot of bandwidth? Or maybe I need to do something special on the server?

Just dragging one image from the network folder on to my desktop on the Mac makes the cursor think in about 30 seconds, then i can release the button and copy the image. First it calculates how long time it will take to copy the image (for one image??), and about 1 minute later it is done. And this is just one single image at 3-4 mb's.
 
Lars Petersen said:
Mine is automounted SMB drives/folders as well. How strange? Can I turn some settings off perhaps? Maybe there are some settings which uses a lot of bandwidth? Or maybe I need to do something special on the server?

Just dragging one image from the network folder on to my desktop on the Mac makes the cursor think in about 30 seconds, then i can release the button and copy the image. First it calculates how long time it will take to copy the image (for one image??), and about 1 minute later it is done. And this is just one single image at 3-4 mb's.
Click to expand...
i get exactly the same thing, it drives me insane:mad:
 
Any possibility of getting those SMB shares to be AFP shares?

Like I said before, I have not done any SMB speed-tests, but I am confident AFP does't have those speed issues you guys have.
 
There's definitely something wrong and it should be fixable. I'm not sure how, though, since I have experienced it myself on occasion.

Have you searched Apple's support forums? I'm sure there has to be some article there if this is a common problem.

Is your Mac OS X install up to date?

Edit: Does this help?:
13. If you are connecting to Windows XP, make sure that the Internet Connection Firewall settings are not interfering with your connection. SMB uses ports 137, 138 and 139. These ports should be open on the Windows XP computer. This may require "Advanced" configuration of the XP firewall.
Click to expand...
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106471


Edit: This may help:
This can be many different things. Such small files could possibly benefit by turning off delayed ack AND/OR by adding this 'large readwrite = no' to your smb.conf file.

To turn off delayed acks, either add the following line to /etc/sysctl.conf (this is the file that is read on boot to set sysctl variables):

net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0

This simply tells the TCP stack in the kernel to not delay packet acks. The reason the slow down occurs is that when you are not sending anything to the Samba server, but attempting to copy a huge file from it, your computer will queue up a bunch of acks, and then send them after a bit. This causes the Samba server to stop sending files as fast, and then you end up going only a few kilobytes per second.

If you want instant gratification, open up a terminal window and run this

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

this will ask for YOUR password. Type it in and see how it goes.

This is the same as what is in /etc/sysctl.conf, but the setting will be lost after a reboot.

(A good discussion of this can be seen in a discussion on MacOSXHints)

Peter
Click to expand...
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1349466&#1349466
 
Lars Petersen said:
Any news on this?
Click to expand...
I think I remember something about the way different API's size the chunks of data for writing files...IIRC the carbon file routines write in very small chunks which means that when your send say 8 kb every time (just example), the routines have to wait until the server has confirmed its stored the 8 kb completely, so if your sending a 128 kb file, it has to wait 16 times for the server to reply its actually written the chunk. IIRC other APIs send using larger chunks, so its faster using a network because it doesn't need to wait for so many replies from the server, but the carbon routine may be faster in local storage (again this is AFIAK, I may be wrong...).

To confirm this, try to copy a file using the finder, then copy the same file using the terminal using cp. See if there is any difference....
 
Duh - Don't think so !

iphil said:
If the networked drive on the windows box is NTFS then Macs Can't write to the drive only read to the drive
Click to expand...

This is NOT true - it would be true if the hard drive was physically connected to your Mac, but it is not, the server reads and writes to the Hard drive and not your Mac ! - It is SLOOOOOW sometimes, I tend to use AFP where possible rather than SMB (Samba) shares - this does tend to speed things up a lot !
 
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