Slow SMB browsing

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Slow SMB browsing

In a corporate environment, we're seeing long delays for Mac users when first accessing an SMB share. We have a range of device types and OS versions (Monterrey and Ventura).

It takes several minutes (or sometimes longer) to enumerate the folder contents before displaying, and this behaviour appears to be what is described in Adjust SMB browsing behavior in macOS - Apple Support

However, I have implemented this DSDontWriteNetworkStores policy on my test Mac (MacBook Pro 2018, OS 12.4) and it unfortunately makes no difference, still there is a very long delay when first opening an SMB share.

Once the share is finally displayed, the performance thereafter seems to be fine, its just the first display of the folders that takes ages (e.g. in this case there are around 1200 folders).

Is there any other way to ensure that Finder quickly displays the folder contents?

MacBook Pro (2017 – 2020)

Posted on Apr 21, 2023 4:03 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

lw-rz-unia

Level 1

17 points

Apr 27, 2023 10:41 AM in response to Simon_Londoner

We also suffer from this issue, directory listing and even worse transferrates are unbearably slow. Nothing we tried helped, neither settings the afore mentioned setting nor changing settings for SMB Version, Signing etc.

Between 10.12 and 13.x (and Intel and Apple M-Series) nothing really changed. We tried SAMBA-Server on Linux and native Windows Server with no difference - Apples SMB implementation 'smbfs' seems just completely borked:

Downloading a 100M sparse file from the same share to a M1 macBook Air:

Apple smbfs native mount (measured via rsync): ~ 1.6 Megabytes/s
samba4 smbclient (via macports): ~ 7.4 Megabytes/s
SSH/SFTP (rsync): ~ 6.8 Megabytes/s

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Answer 2

Apr 24, 2023 9:51 AM in response to Simon_Londoner

Just to add that these SMB shares and folders open almost instantly on a Windows PC.

On a Mac the delay is proportional to the number of files in the folder. e.g. a folder with 1000 items will typically take 2 minutes to open.

Is there a way to speed this up on a Mac ?

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Answer 3

Nov 27, 2023 10:58 AM in response to Simon_Londoner

I struggled with this for a long time, finally figured it out today (for me, at least). The fix is server-side.

In your /etc/samba/smb.conf file on the server, add this line:

readdir_attr:aapl_max_access = no

I believe this can be set globally or on a per-share basis.

Restart the server with:

sudo service smbd restart

From the Samba documentation:

https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/current/man-html/vfs_fruit.8.html

readdir_attr:aapl_max_access = yes | no

Return the user's effective maximum permissions in SMB2 FIND responses. This is an expensive computation, setting this to off pretends the use has maximum effective permissions.

The default is yes.

So, it sounds like it might break some things with the Finder UI in regards to the share + user's permissions. For me, since this is just a personal NAS, it's a non-issue as my user has full permissions anyway.

Hopefully this helps some people.

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