Slow AFP/SMB browsing only with Mac OS X clients

[Abel408]

I know this has come up a lot, but I think my situation is a little different. I'm using FreeNAS 9.2.0 and browsing and speeds are pretty quick on Windows Clients, but can be dreadfully slow on Mac OS X clients. They seem to be worse when the folder consists of many folders and files. I Folder that consists of 100 or so other folders can take up to 2 minutes to load. Seems to load instantly on Windows clients. This appears to be true of both AFP and SMB. Transfer speeds seem to be alright though. When the folder finally loads and I back out of it, the folder seems to load instantly when going back into it. When I unmount the drive, then remount, browsing seems to suffer again.

Any idea what is going on?

 

[dlavigne]

Upgrading may improve this. This feature was added in 9.2.1:

• Switched from Avahi to mDNSResponder for Zeroconf network configuration, improving the Mac share browsing experience.

 

[Abel408]

Thanks. I upgraded to 9.2.1.2 today and unfortunately do not see any kind of improvement. :(

 

[dlavigne]

Which version of Mac OS? Mavericks made significant changes to how Finder loads the content of folders, which could be part of the issue. One of the devs suggested the following to help troubleshoot:

In Terminal on a Mac, without any windows to the folder in question open, do "cd /Volumes/Whatever/path/to/folder ; time ls -l".

If the Mac is taking a significant amount of time (say, more than a minute or two), type shift-control-command-option-. (that is, all the modifier keys and a period) to have it run some diagnostics.

When mounting, are you using "cifs://" or "smb://"

 

[Abel408]

Which version of Mac OS? Mavericks made significant changes to how Finder loads the content of folders, which could be part of the issue. One of the devs suggested the following to help troubleshoot:

In Terminal on a Mac, without any windows to the folder in question open, do "cd /Volumes/Whatever/path/to/folder ; time ls -l".

If the Mac is taking a significant amount of time (say, more than a minute or two), type shift-control-command-option-. (that is, all the modifier keys and a period) to have it run some diagnostics.

When mounting, are you using "cifs://" or "smb://"

We are using all different versions of mac. 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, and 10.9. I believe all of them are having this issue. The issue is also not limited to smb. Seems to be slow on AFP as well. AFP seems a little faster than smb, but not by much. I haven't tried NFS yet. I have tried connecting to cifs which did not fix the problem either.

The ls commands are near instant. Never have a problem working with terminal, only through finder. I will try the sysdiagnose shortcut, although I never know how to read it.

I think the problem has more to do with mac than FreeNAS. I'm having a hard time even trying to troubleshoot it though to find out what exactly finder is doing which getting the directory listing.

Thanks

 

[Shark88]

Is there any news to this? I think I experience similar issues, since I am using CIFS shares on my freenas box which feel quite slow browsing through on a Mac. A Windows clients can browse these shares as they were local folders. I am using the latest freenas version 9.2.1.6.

 

[cyberjock]

I don't own a Mac so I can't provide you with direct support.

But, I know two things:

1. Apple's CIFS/SMB support isn't all it's cracked up to be. From what I understand Apple is working on it, but it is what it is.
2. I've worked with a few clients that have used SMB shares on their Macs. They were quite fast and performed about as well as they did on a Windows machine with no tuning of any kind on the FreeNAS machine.

Sorry, but that's about all the help I can provide. If you want to buy me a Mac I'm more than happy to troubleshoot it for you though. ;)

 

[Shark88]

Thanks for that, I've heard the same about the issues in Apples current protocols because of the switch from AFP to SMB2. I am very happy about the network throughput over SM2 which peaks at nearly 110 MB/s, the slow browsing experience is a little bit annoying. I will just hope for a better performance with the upcoming OS X release 10.10

Sorry currently now Mac as a give away available :)

 

[jamiejunk]

We've seen this problem at work. Believe it or not the problem was that reverse DNS lookups were not working. Make sure your mac client can for forward and reverse dns lookups.

dig servername
dig -x serveripaddress

 

[Shark88]

I just tested both lookups, getting this for the server name:

Code:

;; ANSWER SECTION:
freenas.        9    IN    A    192.168.178.2

And the following answer for the IP address:

Code:

ANSWER SECTION:
2.178.168.192.in-addr.arpa. 9    IN    PTR    Freenas.fritz.box

Therefore I assume that both directions work as expected

 

[jamiejunk]

Crud. Sorry man, I thought for sure this would be the golden ticket as I've seen this problem posted all over the net and the reverse dns lookups were the problem. Fixing that fixed their problems. I'm out of ideas... Maybe drop wireshark on it?

 

[Shark88]

It was worth a try! Thanks anyway! I will give it a try if I have more time to investigate this further. If the connection is there the performance is nice, so it should be some trouble during connection phase, lets see.

 

[Abel408]

I've been working on and off of this issue for weeks! I think it has to do with apples DS_Store files. It is very annoying, but I don't think it's limited to just FreeNAS shares. Although my AFP shares on FreeNAS also seem to be a little slow. Could you set up an AFP share on your server and see if yours are also slow?