AFP/SMB Directory Listings very slow in Finder

!! Possible solution that worked for me - at the moment !!

Hello,

I also got the problem that browsing an afp share gets very slow.

My Share is little over 5TB big with much media data.

I tried all the solutions that I found on this forum but nothing helped as much as what I just found.

After spending many hours today to find a solution I finally turned on wireshark to have a look whats going on on port 548 (AFP over TCP Port)

I saw that whenever I opened a folder many requests were send to the server - my guess was that the finder is requesting the little preview images because inside of each request was a filename of the folder I just opened.

My guess is that whenever you open up a folder, OSX sends multiple requests to the server to get the preview image.

The server tries to answer all the requests but when you navigate to another folder the next requests for this folder are sent - kind of DDOS.

After realising this, I went to the root share, right clicked -> Show Vew Options and turned off Show Icon Preview.

The result was phenomenal - afp was fast and the traffic on port 548 was shut down very drastic.

I would like to hear if this solves the problem for others too or if I'm the only one where this helped

Dude!!! Thank you so much. I don't normally log in here to thank people... but man, I've been struggling with slow storage for a while now. Thank you 🙂 **virtual bow**

Btw, I used "defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true" - instantly solved my problem

At my wits end, I tried this, and - bam! Much faster. Certainly not as fast as it used to be, as there is a human-perceptible delay whereas in the past I could not distinguish between folders via SMB on local folders on this very fast server.

But here's the thing - by chance, this fixed two other problems for me. S/MIME decryption was unusably slow in Mai.app, now I have no problem. BusyCal was taking so long to sync with my work's CardDAV server that timeouts were common. Both problems now gone.

I tried another Mac where I had not done this fix, and found that if I simply sign out of my iCloud account then remove all traces of it and reboot, everything is fairly speedy again. So thanks, RichardRSB!! I think you've basically narrowed down the cause of several systemic problems to something related to iCloud syncing.

This solved the issue thank you Cthulhu

It took a while for Finder to list the contents of folders on the Samba share.

I have a Macbook-Pro running MacOS Sierra 10.12.3, I have a Raspberry Pi 3 Running Raspbian OS: 9 Stretch, Kernel: 4.4.38-v7+) and Samba (Version 4.5.2-Debian).

Many Thanks

Maybe you need to try High Sierra now that is released. I can see a folder with 451 items, select them all and expand them all without any issues.

Will try on my other mac as well. Hope High Sierra solves between others. 🙂

I'm having problems like those mentioned here with the Finder crashing/slow when accessing a SMB shared drive from one macOS High Sierra 10.13 machine to another.

AFP works flawlessly and speedily — but trying to switch away from AFP as Apple requests is a nightmare. Their SMB implementation doesn't seem at all stable in the Finder!

Connecting seems fine, but within 30 minutes or so of using files across the network the client machine's Finder starts spinning the beachball then crashing/freezing. Directory listing on the remote disk starts showing empty folders where we know there are files residing. Sometimes it requires the computer be force-rebooted via the power button. I was even able to log in to the frozen client machine via SSH and do a "sudo shutdown -r now" command and it never fully restarted until holding the power button.

We got back up and running though after each reboot and checked the disk with Disk Utility: NO problems found. 10 minutes later Finder crashing again after connecting to the sharepoint via SMB again.

All this happened a dozen times over 4 hours until I gave up and turned the sharing machine back to AFP sharing then *poof* everything magically works flawless again. Turning on SMB does not allow us to work — every time it fails.

Tried Deleting all caches.

Tried Checking the hard drive with Disk Utility.

Tried turning off "Put Hard Disks to sleep when possible" setting on both machines.

Apple needs to fix this. Judging from the many posts in the forums there have been SMB problems like this for years now! Unacceptable — especially when using nothing but Mac-to-Mac networking, and having the only functional solution deprecated by Apple!

i too have found connecting to my remote lion server via afp has become very slow when browsing in finder. Connection and file transfers themselves seem ok. Previous to Mavericks install it was much quicker to use.

Same issue been dealing with it all day. Talk to apple they ran a data collection test on my MBP and told me they would get back to me in a couple days. I cant work of the server it is that bad. have you figured anything out.

Im showing my ignorance here but could you tell me how to do that switch to sshfs I read a few tutorials on it and tried but got lost I down load fuse and sshfs and installed then but got messed up with terminal and putting in the right info? I to rely completely on the server to work im at a stand still

Experienced similar problems; most probably due to problems with the browsing client's Finder using .DS_store files on the remote server. The deeper into the remote server's directory tree you browse, the longer the delay. All good though after typing the following in Terminal (no SUDO needed) and rebooting the client.

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

Yes, we're definitely seeing this too. Tried many things, nothing to date has worked.

I have been having a similar issue. Pre Mavericks it connected fine now it takes ages and is really hampering productivity.