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shantarayesterday at 4:23 PM8 repliesview on HN

>Apple made SMB its primary file-sharing protocol in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, over 12 years ago…

…and yet SMB support in macOS remains slow and buggy to this day. I tried all combinations of server-side settings and obscure plist tweaks to make SMB navigation and search work as fast as they do on my Linux machine out of box before giving up. It is very obviously not a priority for their services revenue, so there’s no incentive for fixing any of the long standing problems.


Replies

realityfactchexyesterday at 4:59 PM

> SMB support in macOS remains slow and buggy to this day. I tried all combinations of server-side settings and obscure plist tweaks to make SMB navigation and search work as fast as they do on my Linux machine out of box before giving up. It is very obviously not a priority for their services revenue

That's where my thoughts went, too. I can make SMB "better" but not "great" usually, but it's annoying to have to look up and apply, and still have things not optimal. Just in case, IIRC I find this the most useful:

  defaults read com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores
  defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool TRUE
But surely some of the other tweaks that LLMs suggest may help, too.
yobertyesterday at 4:30 PM

I found something fun last week--- Apparently if you use Adobe tools, there is a sync plugin they install for finder that can cause big issues with SMB shares. Might help you if you have that!

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p_ingyesterday at 5:20 PM

Apple has their own implementation of SMB in macOS and it's one of the worst out there. Dropping connections, can't re-establish connections automatically after sleep, and performance issues.

Why they didn't keep Samba (licensing, probably) is beyond me.

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nubinetworktoday at 10:55 AM

I'm more surprised they made it the default... with a Unix backend, why didn't they improve/expand nfs?

traderj0eyesterday at 5:25 PM

Yeah, can't remember the last time I even bothered with SMB because it's so buggy. Usually I don't need filesystem behavior, I'll just push/pull files over SSH.

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somatyesterday at 8:39 PM

How is nfs on mac?

Not really equivalent, I know, but if smb is that bad I am curious about alternatives.

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kstrauseryesterday at 4:30 PM

I can pull about 700MB/s off my NAS over a 10Gb link. I wouldn’t exactly call it slow.

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