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!!