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Level 1

31 points

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 4:30 AM

Best reply

knob1

Level 1

9 points

Posted on Nov 26, 2015 6:50 AM

!! 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

View in context

183 replies

BobHarris

Level 9

53,081 points

Dec 27, 2016 11:32 AM in response to RichardRSB

RichardRSB wrote:

This issue has something to do with the cloudd (double-d) service.

Loading a 200 subdir on my Sybnology NAS could take 20-40 minutes. Now it loads in seconds.

Here is how to solve this:

Go to ~/Library/Caches/CloudKit/

Remove CloudKitMetadata, CloudKitMetadata-shm, CloudKitMetadata-wal

Kill Cloudd in Activity monitor. Cloudd will restart automatically, and rebuild the databases.

DONE.

Good luck, and backup you data!

Richard

Why not file a bug with Apple engineering, with your work around. They may ignore it, and close your bug, but it is always possible it will cause someone to look more closely at why removing the CloudKitMetadata files improves file sharing access.

BugReporter (Free ADC (Apple Developer Connection) account needed for BugReporter

<http://bugreporter.apple.com>

Anyone can get a free ADC account at:

<https://developer.apple.com/register/index.action>

Jan 16, 2017 12:51 PM in response to knob1

Excellent find/nugget... thank you

Sep 28, 2017 11:06 PM in response to jedi34567

Comparing to Windows it's still extremely slow. Open a folder containing 107 items took 4,2 seconds. That's at least 4,1 seconds longer than my Windows collegues.

AFP/SMB Directory Listings very slow in Finder