Finder slow at listing directory content from SMB shares

Hey All,

Been battling with this issue for months now. Our CEO has even gone so far as to suggest we "just buy a new VPN." Our VPN is very obviously not to blame for the slow folder navigation when it works perfectly fine in Windows, and in Mac using alternate finders like MuCommander or Pathfinder.

I've tried all the suggestions in this thread, as well as suggestions from every other thread I could find. None of it has made any difference whatsoever. I've also tried tweaking on our file server as well, as trialed GroupLogic's ExtremeZ-IP software. Nothing has made a difference for me.

Couple of things I am concerned with.

1) In Mac OS Mountain Lion there is no smb.conf file that I could find. Is this normal? Was it there in previous versions and later removed?

2) I created a nsmb.conf file and filled in the settings as suggested. How can I actually verify these settings are actually taking affect?

Personally I am fed up with troubleshooting this issue. I wish Apple would just man up, admit there is a problem and fix it once and for all. Trying to integrate these machines into our Windows Enterprise environment has been the bane of my existence.

"Trying to integrate these machines into our Windows Enterprise environment has been the bane of my existence."

It's interesting to see these problems persist a year after these issues forced me to sell my mac. Apple is a distant memory to me yet I keep getting notifications in my email that this problem lives on.You should tell your boss that apple is simply not an enterprise machine and is designed for home users who think being forced to do things the "apple way" is being creative. There are a couple of things you could try such as putting them on wifi or forcing 100mbit. I seem to remember this was only an issue for gigabit.

The nsmb.conf worked for me! There is no longer any lag in browsing the file contents!

But my printer which is shared on the same windows machine stopped working. Any workaround in the code?

"Shame on them, not even Bill Gates created this much havoc. We have a 6Tb NAS with all the company CAD files on it and its like Russian roulette trying to get any Macs to connect, some times its fine, most times its not. We actually have to use a PC to transfer them to a USB key and back again. Is it 2011? Its pathetic.

Heh. Now it's 2013 and guess what hasn't changed!

"In /etc/smb.conf, change 'use streams' to 'no', and 'darwin_streams:brlm' to 'no'"

This file doesn't seem to exist in Mavericks.

You may need to change the method of connecting to your SMB share from "smb://..." to "cifs://..." under Mavericks due to a change in the underlying SMB implementation. See http://cammodude.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/os-x-109-mavericks-workaround-for-smb.h tml

Granted, this doesn't solve the lack of smb.conf file 🙂

Krishen,

Did you ever find out where smb.conf or equivalent is in Mavericks?

This post http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110430173901534 sounds very convincing, in fixing the slow smb/cifs connections, but it requires editing that file!

I too have been having problems and have been VERY frustrated.

While I have been messing around with various settings mentioned in this this forum and others, one thing has become clear to me. The SMB protocol is working fine but for whatever reason, Finder is having a hard time with it. Solution? I've downloaded alternatives to Finder, such as Path Finder and muCommander and have tested them.

I have found that Path Finder is very buggy for me and does not work well but muCommander is amazing. It is very small, simple and works flawlessly.

I attach a server as I usually do, by holding CMD+K and typing in the IP address "smb://192.168.1.2" **without the quotes** Type in the username and password. Once the server is attached, open muCommander, and go to /Volumes. Once there, you will be able to see the attached server and navigate throughout it as you please.

I hope this helps you guys

Have fun ^_^

Ok, I take back some of what I said in the post above.

After messing around with muCommander, I have realized something profound.... that Apple su*ks!

With that out of the way, if you mount the server as I said earlier (using CMD+K and then navigating to /Volumes/**Server-Volume** within muCommander) it may or may not work. It seems to be very intermittent. So to resolve the problem altogether mount the server volume using the mounting tool inside muCommander.

Open muCommander

Click "Connect to server" or "Control+K"

A window will pop up

Select the "SMB" tab

Type the IP address of the server in "Server"

Type the Share name

The Domain is really not important but you can if you want

Finally enter the username and password

Check the box at the bottom if you want to save the username and password

It should be really quick and once it has been connected, click the "Add to Bookmark" button or "Contol+B"

Now connecting to the server should be really simple. Just click the folder beside the address bar and click on your server.

Let me know if you are having any problems

Have fun ^_^

totally worked. weird.

Thanks, b.javied! muCommander provides very fast smb browsing.

muCommander is fast but opening the files read-only is a limitation. Are there other Finder alternative like muCommander that is fast and would open the files directly and open for edit mode? 😐.

Too bad Apple has not resoved this issue in Finder as many people are switching to SAMBA servers for file sharing using their networked Macs.

Yes, I too found muCommander to be limiting and therefore moved on to using SFTP. It still doesn't allow you to open files directly to view/edit but it is reliable. Plus, you can add permissions and different accounts.

Been using this method for about two months now and so far I am happy with it.