TenjuZenjin

Q: AFP/SMB Directory Listings very slow in Finder

Hello comunity!

 

Since the upgrade to OS X Mavericks we are experiencing server problems, browsing AFP/SMB shares on remote servers (VPN). The Directory Listing is very slow an can take up to 30 minutes for large listings.

 

Here's the setup

 

  • 2 networks are connected thanks to a VPN connection.
  • All clients, in all connected networks can communicate to a common fileserver (MacPro with OS X 10.6 SnowLeopard Server) in Network A
  • Firewall is not an issue between those networks
  • The fileserver also has other network services set up (DNS, Mailserver, SMB, AFP, Firewall, ...)
  • The clients authenticate via OpenDirectory and Kerberos to the fileserver

 

So the problems occur if i want to connect a client on network B to the server on network A. Connection, authentication, ... all good. Even the performance over the VPN, to tranfer files is OK. But browsing subfolders is catastrophic. I used AFP and SMB alike, results are the same.

 

I also made tests on older clients, to see if the fileserver is the problem. 10.6 and 10.8 clients can browse normally, speed is OK. Even Windows Clients can browse normally all the subfolders of the fileserver.

 

I analyzed different approaches made here, but none of them worked:

  • Connect to share with explicit port
  • Connect to share with FQDN
  • Connect to share with port 445 (SMB)
  • Setup an nsmb.conf with notify_off=yes
  • ...

 

I also did analyze different logs and there's something i found, but can not say if it's connected. I did see many log entries like this:

...

29.10.13 12:21:51,960 icbaccountsd[775]: -[ICBLocalDictionary writeLocalMapping:]: Status: Writing out local mapping to disk

29.10.13 12:21:51,960 icbaccountsd[775]: -[ICBLocalDictionary writeLocalMapping:]: Status: Ending writing out local mapping to disk

29.10.13 12:21:51,960 icbaccountsd[775]: -[ICBRemoteDictionary writeDevices]: Status: Writing out of devices

29.10.13 12:21:51,960 icbaccountsd[775]: -[ICBRemoteDictionary writeDevices]: Status: Ending writing out of device

...

 

I also saw tha a process "icbaccountsd" was often coming up an using all of my CPU, when i start browsing the share. Thus i could not find any documentation on it.

 

So my question: What can I do to accelerate the browsing of my AFP/SMB shares for all my Mavericks clients? What can I do to speed up the Directory Listing? And yes: i know about solutions like PathFinder, TotalFinder, .... but i'm more interested in a native solution to this problem.

 

Thx!!

OS X Mavericks (10.9), 10.6.8 Server

Posted on Oct 29, 2013 4:33 AM

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Q: AFP/SMB Directory Listings very slow in Finder

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  • by joewebdms,

    joewebdms joewebdms May 7, 2014 6:50 AM in response to austinfurlvr
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 7, 2014 6:50 AM in response to austinfurlvr

    Did you try forcing your clients to connect over tcp?  I really think the native NetBOIS is broken/slow on Maverick.  To troubleshoot, I forced NetBOIS over TCP in my nsmb.conf file on the Maverick client: 

     

    [default]

    port445=no_netbois

     

    If you can't connect after making this change, then netbois over tcp is not enabled on the server.  The "Normal" or default setting for port445 is to first try 445, then via NetBOIS.  So your server probably does not have NetBOIS over TCP enabled or your clients would have selected that first.

  • by atothek47,

    atothek47 atothek47 May 7, 2014 7:22 AM in response to TenjuZenjin
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 7, 2014 7:22 AM in response to TenjuZenjin

    I'm using AFP on OS X 10.9.2 with an ancient Synology DS211J NAS and I followed this guide from EMC and my directory listings are blazing fast now.  The doc has a good description of how Mac OS handles gathering ALL the metadata from a folder before showing ANYTHING on the screen to the end user.  This means if you have lot of files in a directory it will be slow still even with AFP.  The doc describes how NFS is faster because of the metadata parsing.

     

    This doc was a lifesaver for me, but requires some Terminal commands to be run.  Again, mine is about 10x faster now, so hope it helps you.  Big thanks to Bernie Case and EMC!!!

     

    https://www.emc.com/colla.../TechnicalDocument/docu51273.pdf

  • by atothek47,

    atothek47 atothek47 May 7, 2014 7:26 AM in response to atothek47
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 7, 2014 7:26 AM in response to atothek47

    By the way, I'm still using AFP from the Mac and I used none of the suggestions from this post but rather all the suggestions for SMB and Finder in the EMC guide.  (i'm using SMB also for Windows on my LAN)

  • by eurisko67,

    eurisko67 eurisko67 May 7, 2014 2:45 PM in response to leoinspace
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 7, 2014 2:45 PM in response to leoinspace

    This entire situation since Mavericks was available is  entirely Apple's fault and after over 6 months they still haven't resolved it with us all scrabbling around to work around their mistake.

     

    I can't even use my NAS any more and frankly the fact that they haven't come out with a fix in this time is disgusting.

     

    Even when MS realised (stupidly) that removing the start button was an extremely dumb idea and that the 'metro' interface isn't really appropriate for laptop use, they fix it.

     

    I've not seen any movement or acknowledgement from Apple on admitting this is an error on their part and the arrogance of not even providing a makeshift workaround.

     

    I have used Macs since 1987 and this is one of the fundamental parts of an OS and that's how to 'find files'.  I guess that's why they called it 'The Finder'. 

     

    Well I want to see this problem fixed in double quick time. I don't want to see cobbled together new protocol drivers because the licensing of SMB doesn't suit them.  It's broken so fix it.  However I don't expect this to cost me anything to get a utility to cover their ***** for a **** upgrade.

     

    I want my NAS box directory back and listed at a decent speed.  And before anyone says have you reported this to Apple the answer is yes but if they haven't noticed this forum then they're blind as well.

  • by atothek47,

    atothek47 atothek47 May 7, 2014 3:45 PM in response to eurisko67
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 7, 2014 3:45 PM in response to eurisko67

    Have you tried the steps I posted?  Mine was unuseable also but now it works pretty well. What protocol are you using?  Does Apple review this forum?  I thought this was a user-only forum, but maybe I'm wrong.

  • by austinfurlvr,

    austinfurlvr austinfurlvr May 7, 2014 7:37 PM in response to atothek47
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 7, 2014 7:37 PM in response to atothek47

    Hi Atothek47 - thanks for your reply ...  so I dont even know what a Synology is...   I'm connecting from a mac on 10.9.2  over internet to an iMac on 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) - it sounds like we have the same problem - but there are no instructions on how to get the server mac to use NFS?   (I tried SMB://servername - dismal results, I tried FTP://servername - worked but I dont want the world getting into my server - and I tried CIFS://servername and it worked - but just as slow as SMB - 

     

    Like I said I did the spotlight fix and the DS_store correction somewhere in this post... yet some folders still take > 2 mins to open....  whereas on my 2006 imac adjacent to new one - the display is lightning fast...

     

    Is it just as simple as NFS://servername to use this protocol?

  • by atothek47,

    atothek47 atothek47 May 9, 2014 9:04 AM in response to austinfurlvr
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 9, 2014 9:04 AM in response to austinfurlvr

    NFS is for Unix file sharing and has to be configured on both the client and server side, so no, you won't be able to just type NFS://servername and have NFS functioning.  Are you wanting to share files with SMB or AFP?  I didn't understand what you meant by connecting to a Mac over the internet.  SMB and AFP are primarily designed to share files between computers on a local network or over a VPN.  You wouldn't want to expose SMB or AFP directly to the internet.

     

    Did you read the EMC guide I posted?  There's numerous tips to help you in there.

  • by NathanTheGr8,

    NathanTheGr8 NathanTheGr8 May 15, 2014 11:46 AM in response to TenjuZenjin
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 15, 2014 11:46 AM in response to TenjuZenjin

    Has 10.9.3 fixed this?

  • by Jason Buecker,

    Jason Buecker Jason Buecker May 15, 2014 12:08 PM in response to NathanTheGr8
    Level 1 (120 points)
    Servers Enterprise
    May 15, 2014 12:08 PM in response to NathanTheGr8

    Unfortunately No, from my limited testing of AFP to AFP via WAN over High Speed VPN.

     

     

    JB

  • by ncalliari,

    ncalliari ncalliari May 15, 2014 4:12 PM in response to pulsar37
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 15, 2014 4:12 PM in response to pulsar37

    "Smb2CreditsMin and Smb2CreditsMax

    HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters\Smb2CreditsMin 
    HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters\Smb2CreditsMax 

     

    The defaults, usually not present in the registry by default, are 512 and 8192, respectively. I simply created a new DWORD for Smb2CreditsMin set to 768 and Smb2CreditsMax set to 16384 (decimal values). This made  browsing a Windows share over SMB2 at least as fast as it used to be."

     

     

    THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!

    I've been battling this issue since the release of Mavericks. I'm using Server 2012 R2 and this registry fix has made SMB perfect.

    Thank you very much.

  • by nkalvi,

    nkalvi nkalvi May 16, 2014 5:29 AM in response to pulsar37
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 16, 2014 5:29 AM in response to pulsar37

    Thank you very much - this helped to alleviate annoying SMB2 issues that cropped up after 10.9.3 (betas).

  • by HR,

    HR HR May 21, 2014 10:25 AM in response to TenjuZenjin
    Level 2 (439 points)
    May 21, 2014 10:25 AM in response to TenjuZenjin

    Just an approach that may help some of you out.  We run a headless server and 3 Mac's in the house.  They all share files via file sharing and screen sharing is used to support the headless server.  We just got our first Maverick Mac, a new MBA.

     

    I've seen the slowness, it was awful at first.  I tried all of the "solutions" I've seen, many tending to be quite techy, nothing worked.

     

    I finally simply blew away all sharing users in every box, shut down file sharing and redid all of it.  Takes a while but both file sharing and screen sharing both immediately started behaving like they used to.  I did it while all Mac's were on the network at the same time and visible.  I think this may be important as I noticed the Maverick problems were actually affecting the Mountain Lion and Snow Leopard machines when the Maverick Air was connected to them.  There's more than just a sharing issue going on.

     

    For those considering rolling back to Mountain Lion and have read it can't be done, I can say it works just fine on the 2014 MBA's.  I ended up doing it as Maverick is simply not as smooth and has more than a few issues I ran into which appear to be shared by many (file and screen sharing, Mail, GUI/scrolling, silly/persistent notifications nags, iPhoto library incompatibilities with no ability to rollback to older versions).  I simply cloned over an ML copy of a mid-'09 iMac and changed a few settings to reflect what I wanted in the Air.

  • by sweetcider,

    sweetcider sweetcider May 21, 2014 9:39 PM in response to pulsar37
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 21, 2014 9:39 PM in response to pulsar37

    An alternative to using regedit for those uncomfortable messing with the registry is to user powershell SMB share cmdlets.  It's really easy.

     

    Bring up an administrative command prompt and type in powershell.  At the resulting prompt, type in

    get-smbserverconfiguration (it's all one word) and look up your current values for smb2creditsmin and smb2creditsmax.  On Windows 8.1, mine were 128 and 2048 respectively.

     

    Now type set-smbserverconfiguration -smb2creditsmin 512 -smb2creditsmax 8192 and respond Y to the confirmation prompt.  Then just exit out of powershell and exit out of the command prompt.

     

    Directory listings on the network share went from minutes to extremely quick.

     

    Your tip really works, so I thought I'd share an easier way to do exactly what you suggested.  Thanks!

  • by egodestruct,

    egodestruct egodestruct May 24, 2014 6:20 PM in response to TenjuZenjin
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 24, 2014 6:20 PM in response to TenjuZenjin

    Forcing NetBIOS over TCP on the windows machine worked for me!  Thank you so much for that suggestion!  I've tried pretty much all the other suggestions and nothing worked except for that.

  • by austinfurlvr,

    austinfurlvr austinfurlvr May 27, 2014 10:39 PM in response to pguthrie
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 27, 2014 10:39 PM in response to pguthrie

    pguthris is right - I have an ancient 2007 white imac that can access AFP file server via internet and the finder file list pops up in <2 seconds...   on brand new 2014 iMac w Mavericks 10.9.2 a window and scroll for several minutes before listing 4 or 5 files inside... (tested on same connection)

     

    I've tried forcing SMB connection , still slow, and several of the other suggestions on this thread to no avail...

     

    anyone have something else?    I also have a call logged with apple and doing data dumps to them for them to analyze...    if I find anything I'll post it... but right now...    it's open a folder, take a nap, open a folder, take a nap.

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