[wazoox]

Apple doesn't take the professionals seriously. Yes, they supposedly shifted from AFP to SMB in 2013 but ever since, SMB performance of Mac OS hovered between laughable and abysmal. And it's not so much the SMB server, but the SMB client implementation that sucks.

On gigabit ethernet, AFP as well as NFS on Mac reach easily 100 MB/s, while SMB hardly passes 50 MB/s. On 10GigE it's even worse: AFP, 1GB/s, SMB 150 MB/s. Testing on a Hackintosh, the same hardware that hardly passes 150 MB/s in SMB reaches 900 MB/s running Windows 10.

SMB on MacOS is a bad joke for everyone needing to move big amounts of data. NFS works OK, but alas, the Finder has (many) bugs and some things don't work well (refreshing, icons, etc). AFP is still by far the best solution.

[zbentley]

I've found that tuning some of the SMB options ("man nsmb.conf") has dramatically increased my recent Macs' SMB network throughput and the responsiveness of finder in huge/deep shared directory hierarchies (due to caching).

I don't know if any of those apply to using OSX as an SMB drive host, but they might.

None of this should be taken as disagreement with your post; just ideas for improvements if you find yourself thus frustrated again.