AFP/SMB Directory Listings very slow in Finder

Thank you very much - this helped to alleviate annoying SMB2 issues that cropped up after 10.9.3 (betas).

Just an approach that may help some of you out. We run a headless server and 3 Mac's in the house. They all share files via file sharing and screen sharing is used to support the headless server. We just got our first Maverick Mac, a new MBA.

I've seen the slowness, it was awful at first. I tried all of the "solutions" I've seen, many tending to be quite techy, nothing worked.

I finally simply blew away all sharing users in every box, shut down file sharing and redid all of it. Takes a while but both file sharing and screen sharing both immediately started behaving like they used to. I did it while all Mac's were on the network at the same time and visible. I think this may be important as I noticed the Maverick problems were actually affecting the Mountain Lion and Snow Leopard machines when the Maverick Air was connected to them. There's more than just a sharing issue going on.

For those considering rolling back to Mountain Lion and have read it can't be done, I can say it works just fine on the 2014 MBA's. I ended up doing it as Maverick is simply not as smooth and has more than a few issues I ran into which appear to be shared by many (file and screen sharing, Mail, GUI/scrolling, silly/persistent notifications nags, iPhoto library incompatibilities with no ability to rollback to older versions). I simply cloned over an ML copy of a mid-'09 iMac and changed a few settings to reflect what I wanted in the Air.

An alternative to using regedit for those uncomfortable messing with the registry is to user powershell SMB share cmdlets. It's really easy.

Bring up an administrative command prompt and type in powershell. At the resulting prompt, type in

get-smbserverconfiguration (it's all one word) and look up your current values for smb2creditsmin and smb2creditsmax. On Windows 8.1, mine were 128 and 2048 respectively.

Now type set-smbserverconfiguration -smb2creditsmin 512 -smb2creditsmax 8192 and respond Y to the confirmation prompt. Then just exit out of powershell and exit out of the command prompt.

Directory listings on the network share went from minutes to extremely quick.

Your tip really works, so I thought I'd share an easier way to do exactly what you suggested. Thanks!

Forcing NetBIOS over TCP on the windows machine worked for me! Thank you so much for that suggestion! I've tried pretty much all the other suggestions and nothing worked except for that.

pguthris is right - I have an ancient 2007 white imac that can access AFP file server via internet and the finder file list pops up in <2 seconds... on brand new 2014 iMac w Mavericks 10.9.2 a window and scroll for several minutes before listing 4 or 5 files inside... (tested on same connection)

I've tried forcing SMB connection , still slow, and several of the other suggestions on this thread to no avail...

anyone have something else? I also have a call logged with apple and doing data dumps to them for them to analyze... if I find anything I'll post it... but right now... it's open a folder, take a nap, open a folder, take a nap.

Similar here - remote AFP access to 10.6 server via VPN from Mavericks client - grinds to a halt.

Only work-a-rounds that have alleviated the problem somewhat are...

1. Bookmark (in Favourites section in Finder window) individual low-level project folders, rather than crawl the full path from share-point down.

2. Use a Spotlight search for individual project folders.

3. Install Path Finder as an alternative Finder - bypasses whatever the Mavericks FInder is doing to create the delays.

Initial tests with a Mavericks server (replacing 10.6 server) are positive with browsing back to what is expected via a VPN. These tests are ongoing but looks like a replacement is imminent (or possibly a NAS if SMB is found to be a problem for the PCs, as reported on other threads).

Anyone else have issues with files sessions not closing? Users cant move, rename or delete unless i log onto the server and close the file session.

We're using Server 2012 R2, and our users files will stay open on the server even though they don't have them open. I know this is a common problem but its only really become an issue now as it keeps happening to multiple users multiple times a day. It wasnt happening with 2008 R2 and Mountain Lion

WOW,

I'm just shaking my head after this last post. I have seen it all now. I had issue with a client on 2006 R2, and pretty much thought if they upgraded their server it would solve the connection issues. Apparently not. Just so everyone knows, I have now seen connection isssues of Mavericks clients on almost all versions of Windows servers and Mac servers.

The only setup that I have been able to get working with out any major issues is one where a Mac Server running Mavericks is running file sharing, and ALL clients are running Mavericks, AND they use bonjour to connect to the server, WITH only SMB enabled.

In my 15 years of Mac, I have never had an OS with such a sever issue. I'm embarrased for Apple.

it was happening occasionally on 2008. Thinking about testing out Novell Open Enterprise Server

Hello,

So far i have done quite a bit of work to find a fix to the SMB issues in OSX mavericks. By this time I have tried every single posted "solution" out there.

There are multiple issues with Mavericks SMB and Finder implementations. These issues stack on one another. Some issues may only be evident under the right circumstances. For example lots of small files and directories and very large SMB shares. This explains why some people report issues some don't. I belive that the people that report Maverics as working "wonderfully" simple do not have the scale to see an issue. Mavericks works great until you put it under stress. Here are my findings (general terms is late to type)

Issue 1) Listings of large directories in SMB shares take a long time. This is one issue that can be fixed if the directory listing is made of other subdirectories. It is simply a matter of removing all .DS_Store files and modifying the OSX clients to not write these files to network shares. (defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true) If the directory/subdirectory structure is well planned then some of of the below SMB issues can be alleviated.

Issue 2) Slow small file operations (list read write). OSX's SMB implementation does not perform well with small file operations. This causes slow listings of directories that are full of small files. The work around is to modify the file structure to avoid large directories of small files.

Issue 3) Finder likes to adquire all metadata from a directory before it renders the listing. No fix for this. it just adds to issue 2. However work around is to modify the file structure to avoid large directories of small files.

Issue 4) Slow reads and writes of "files" that are actually directories full of small files, for example keynote files and iPhoto libraries. I have not found a single solution for this but it comes down to poor small file performance in OSX's SMB

I have done my testings with both single Samba servers. and Clustered Samba servers. I am very confident on the Samba server side. I have also tried server side tweaks. It always comes down to the OSX client being at fault. Windows Linux clients always perform well. Working for a creative company means that a large majority of our user base is OSX and I am really eager for apple to address this issues.

I have to add that large file operations work great in Mavericks i ussually get full bandwidth 100MBps to 120MBps when reading and writing single large files.

Pulsar37 wrote:

The defaults, usually not present in the registry by default, are 512 and 8192, respectively. I simply created a new DWORD for Smb2CreditsMin set to 768 and Smb2CreditsMax set to 16384 (decimal values).

I am running Windows 8 and sharing folders on my home network with an OS X 10.9.3 MacBook Pro. This tweak worked really well for me. I am curious why you choose 768 (min) and 16384(max). Thank you so much for the help!

Glad to help. Honestly, the numbers were an educated guess and trial and error, based on this MSDN doc and the appendix links in that doc (161 thru 163). The reason I say educated guess is because I haven't yet determined precisely what Mavericks is doing that causes Windows servers to make it "talk to the hand". It could be an issue with Mavericks handling of smb2 sequence numbers, or just overzealousness with simultaneous requests.

In any case, Smb2CreditsMin is the limited number of credits the server will freely give a client just for asking, and that can help with Mavericks' tendency to request tons of info about directory contents immediately upon connecting. Standard Windows has a min value of 128, Windows Server has a min value of 512, so 768 seemed a modestly appropriate incremental increase. I then merely doubled the Smb2CreditsMax value to make sure Mavericks clients wouldn't hit a wall by potentially consuming the min value immediately and then ramping up requests.

While this tweak works well for me, I have no more than 6 Mavericks clients connecting to the server at once. In an environment where there are many more clients than that, this tweak might let all those hungry Macs saturate a small server.

I have a WIndows 8 server and workstations with OSX 10.9.3.

Force enable NetBios over TCP/IP solved!

This link has the path to get there, but click Enable instead of Disable:

http://chandank.com/os/netbios-disable-windows-8

I'd like to add one thing which also helped. After forcing the connection to Samba 1 (posted somewhere above in this discussion), listings of folders can be speedier when you shut down the samba notification (the old apple problem). Write "notify_off=yes" to your nsmb.conf file in /etc. You can write this line to Terminal:

sudo sh -cv "echo '[notify_off=yes]' >> /etc/nsmb.conf"

I would like to add my 0,20 cents here:

Situation = (same issue here) MAVERICKS + WINDOWS 8.1 shares... very, very slow browsing.

(Gigabit switch, wired ethernet, RAID 0 on Windows 8.1 with 3HDs and RAID 1 on OSX with 2HDs)

So i decided to test two scenarios:

1) Using only cifs:\\ shares (smb1 on OSX) = a) browsing are really fast, but b) no transfers got more then 450Mbits either for lager files (more then 25Gb) or smaller files;

2) Using smb:\\ shares (smb2 on OSX now) = a) browsing like **** (5min to list 200 files), but all transfers toutched the ceilling here at 850Mbits to files larger than 12Gb and 980Mbits for files smaller than 12Gb (I think that files within the windows cache are faster);

I also tested some NAS providers over my corporate network and one specially designed to operate at 4Gbits speeds (FreeNAS with 6HDs plus two eth interfaces) gave me slow browing under Mavericks. It also had smb2 under the hood and browsing was signifcantly faster then windows 8.1, but really slower then previous OSX versions.

I will try touching the windows parameters here as well as shutting down the .DS files to see how far can my MBPro lands here.

Txns for tips!!!