[shantara]

>Apple made SMB its primary file-sharing protocol in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, over 12 years ago…

…and yet SMB support in macOS remains slow and buggy to this day. I tried all combinations of server-side settings and obscure plist tweaks to make SMB navigation and search work as fast as they do on my Linux machine out of box before giving up. It is very obviously not a priority for their services revenue, so there’s no incentive for fixing any of the long standing problems.

[realityfactchex]

> SMB support in macOS remains slow and buggy to this day. I tried all combinations of server-side settings and obscure plist tweaks to make SMB navigation and search work as fast as they do on my Linux machine out of box before giving up. It is very obviously not a priority for their services revenue

That's where my thoughts went, too. I can make SMB "better" but not "great" usually, but it's annoying to have to look up and apply, and still have things not optimal. Just in case, IIRC I find this the most useful:

  defaults read com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores
  defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool TRUE

But surely some of the other tweaks that LLMs suggest may help, too.

[yobert]

I found something fun last week--- Apparently if you use Adobe tools, there is a sync plugin they install for finder that can cause big issues with SMB shares. Might help you if you have that!

[catoc]

Would you have any more info? I have both: adobe synctool + issues with smb shares

[p_ing]

Apple has their own implementation of SMB in macOS and it's one of the worst out there. Dropping connections, can't re-establish connections automatically after sleep, and performance issues.

Why they didn't keep Samba (licensing, probably) is beyond me.

[kalleboo]

> licensing, probably

Correct, Apple has dropped everything that switched to GPLv3 which includes newer versions of bash, samba, etc.

[traderj0e]

Yeah, can't remember the last time I even bothered with SMB because it's so buggy. Usually I don't need filesystem behavior, I'll just push/pull files over SSH.

[eastbound]

I regret the difficulty of mounting an SSH connection as a filesystem. It requires Fuse and giving permissions to the kernel.

[traderj0e]

I used to do that a lot in some old versions of OS X, but then MacFUSE got abandoned and picked up as osxfuse, then that broke then got fixed repeatedly with several Mac updates, and I gave up.

[somat]

How is nfs on mac?

Not really equivalent, I know, but if smb is that bad I am curious about alternatives.

[wazoox]

NFS works way better than SMB, but the Finder is not without its troubles. Sometimes it will take 10 minutes to display a folder for reasons, mostly.

The Finder is really an horrible piece of sh*t of software, slow as hell, doesn't provide the most basic information[1], and, of course, doesn't work properly when browsing network shares either SMB or NFS.

[1]virtually all common file browsers (Windows Explorer, Gnome Nautilus, KDE dolphin) displays at all times : the number of files in the current folder, their size, the number of files selected, their size; also all but the Finder have a "recent files" section that actually contains the latest files used, while the Finder displays a completely random selection of recent files, but never the most recently used ones.

[daneel_w]

With the exception of summed size of selected items, the Finder has all of that. Help yourself to the "View->Show Status Bar" menu option. Also, "View->Show View Options->Calculate All Sizes" to show storage size for directories.

[nubinetwork]

I'm more surprised they made it the default... with a Unix backend, why didn't they improve/expand nfs?

[kstrauser]

I can pull about 700MB/s off my NAS over a 10Gb link. I wouldn’t exactly call it slow.

[Melatonic]

In a corporate environment SMB3 on MacOS was lagging Windows and Linux big time (at least a few years ago when I tested).

How's the latest to your NAS? Are those single large files or many small files ?

[j16sdiz]

I think SMB is quite chatty -- if you have lots of small files, you can get quite slow.

[cyberpunk]

You can mount webdav — which has been more reliable for us.

[p_ing]

That was SMBv1. Not SMB of today.

[brigade]

Still true for extended attributes, which Finder and Spotlight love to query.

[WorldPeas]

...and don't even get me started on locking, if many people write to one file you're on borrowed time