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>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.

>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.

nubinetwork 5mo ago
I'm more surprised they made it the default... with a Unix backend, why didn't they improve/expand nfs?
kstrauser 5mo ago
I can pull about 700MB/s off my NAS over a 10Gb link. I wouldn’t exactly call it slow.
- j16sdiz 5mo ago
  I think SMB is quite chatty -- if you have lots of small files, you can get quite slow.
  - cyberpunk 5mo ago
    You can mount webdav — which has been more reliable for us.
  - WorldPeas 5mo ago
    ...and don't even get me started on locking, if many people write to one file you're on borrowed time
  - p_ing 5mo ago
    That was SMBv1. Not SMB of today.
    - brigade 5mo ago
      Still true for extended attributes, which Finder and Spotlight love to query.
- Melatonic 5mo ago
  In a corporate environment SMB3 on MacOS was lagging Windows and Linux big time (at least a few years ago when I tested). How's the latest to your NAS? Are those single large files or many small files ?
yobert 5mo ago
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!
- catoc 5mo ago
  Would you have any more info? I have both: adobe synctool + issues with smb shares
realityfactchex 5mo ago
> 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.
p_ing 5mo ago
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.
- kalleboo 5mo ago
  > licensing, probably Correct, Apple has dropped everything that switched to GPLv3 which includes newer versions of bash, samba, etc.
traderj0e 5mo ago
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.
- eastbound 5mo ago
  I regret the difficulty of mounting an SSH connection as a filesystem. It requires Fuse and giving permissions to the kernel.
  - traderj0e 5mo ago
    I used to do that a lot in some old versions of OS X, but then MacFUSE got abandoned and picked up as osxfuse, then that broke then got fixed repeatedly with several Mac updates, and I gave up.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
somat 5mo ago
How is nfs on mac? Not really equivalent, I know, but if smb is that bad I am curious about alternatives.
- wazoox 5mo ago
  NFS works way better than SMB, but the Finder is not without its troubles. Sometimes it will take 10 minutes to display a folder for reasons, mostly. The Finder is really an horrible piece of sh*t of software, slow as hell, doesn't provide the most basic information[1], and, of course, doesn't work properly when browsing network shares either SMB or NFS. [1]virtually all common file browsers (Windows Explorer, Gnome Nautilus, KDE dolphin) displays at all times : the number of files in the current folder, their size, the number of files selected, their size; also all but the Finder have a "recent files" section that actually contains the latest files used, while the Finder displays a completely random selection of recent files, but never the most recently used ones.
  - daneel_w 5mo ago
    With the exception of summed size of selected items, the Finder has all of that. Help yourself to the "View->Show Status Bar" menu option. Also, "View->Show View Options->Calculate All Sizes" to show storage size for directories.

nubinetwork 5mo ago

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

kstrauser 5mo ago

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

j16sdiz 5mo ago
I think SMB is quite chatty -- if you have lots of small files, you can get quite slow.
- cyberpunk 5mo ago
  You can mount webdav — which has been more reliable for us.
- WorldPeas 5mo ago
  ...and don't even get me started on locking, if many people write to one file you're on borrowed time
- p_ing 5mo ago
  That was SMBv1. Not SMB of today.
  - brigade 5mo ago
    Still true for extended attributes, which Finder and Spotlight love to query.
Melatonic 5mo ago
In a corporate environment SMB3 on MacOS was lagging Windows and Linux big time (at least a few years ago when I tested). How's the latest to your NAS? Are those single large files or many small files ?

yobert 5mo ago

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!

catoc 5mo ago
Would you have any more info? I have both: adobe synctool + issues with smb shares

realityfactchex 5mo ago

> 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.

p_ing 5mo ago

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.

kalleboo 5mo ago
> licensing, probably Correct, Apple has dropped everything that switched to GPLv3 which includes newer versions of bash, samba, etc.

traderj0e 5mo ago

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.

eastbound 5mo ago
I regret the difficulty of mounting an SSH connection as a filesystem. It requires Fuse and giving permissions to the kernel.
- traderj0e 5mo ago
  I used to do that a lot in some old versions of OS X, but then MacFUSE got abandoned and picked up as osxfuse, then that broke then got fixed repeatedly with several Mac updates, and I gave up.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

somat 5mo ago

How is nfs on mac? Not really equivalent, I know, but if smb is that bad I am curious about alternatives.

wazoox 5mo ago
NFS works way better than SMB, but the Finder is not without its troubles. Sometimes it will take 10 minutes to display a folder for reasons, mostly. The Finder is really an horrible piece of sh*t of software, slow as hell, doesn't provide the most basic information[1], and, of course, doesn't work properly when browsing network shares either SMB or NFS. [1]virtually all common file browsers (Windows Explorer, Gnome Nautilus, KDE dolphin) displays at all times : the number of files in the current folder, their size, the number of files selected, their size; also all but the Finder have a "recent files" section that actually contains the latest files used, while the Finder displays a completely random selection of recent files, but never the most recently used ones.
- daneel_w 5mo ago
  With the exception of summed size of selected items, the Finder has all of that. Help yourself to the "View->Show Status Bar" menu option. Also, "View->Show View Options->Calculate All Sizes" to show storage size for directories.