Several years ago, I noticed that SMB file sharing between Macs (running 10.3 Panther at that time, I think) and Windows XP was a lot slower than it should have been. Copying a file took several times as long as between two PCs on the same 100 megabit LAN. Some research turned up the fact that the MacOS X default network parameters are suboptimal, at least when talking to Windows XP. The fix is to, in Terminal with sudo, create the file /etc/sysctl.conf and put some tweaked settings in it.
The same problem exists in Leopard. The sysctl settings to fix it are slightly different for Leopard and Gigabit networks. Here are some explanations. Here is my sysctl.conf for Leopard and Snow Leopard; omit the maxsockbuf line in Lion and later, and you need only the first two lines in Mavericks (I think) and later because Apple changed the defaults to these settings:
net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0
net.inet.tcp.mssdflt=1440
kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=500000
net.inet.tcp.sendspace=250000
net.inet.tcp.recvspace=250000
I also got errors when on a Windows XP client trying to copy files from an OS X share. Windows says it can’t read the source file. Going over to the Mac and copying the same files onto a shared folder on the PC works. Some Googling revealed that there’s a bug in the version of Samba that ships with Leopard. It doesn’t properly support extended attributes (an alternate data stream). I don’t need those anyway, so the fix is to turn off the buggy feature unless it gets fixed in a future release. Here’s the diff:
--- /etc/smb.conf 2009/01/04 22:39:52 1.1
+++ /etc/smb.conf 2009/02/08 14:20:50
@@ -44,7 +44,7 @@
display charset = UTF-8-MAC
dos charset = 437
- vfs objects = darwinacl,darwin_streams
+ vfs objects = darwinacl
; Don't become a master browser unless absolutely necessary.
os level = 2
@@ -56,8 +56,8 @@
use sendfile = yes
; The darwin_streams module gives us named streams support.
- stream support = yes
- ea support = yes
+ stream support = no
+ ea support = no
; Enable locking coherency with AFP.
darwin_streams:brlm = yes
In Snow Leopard (10.6.6), the changes needed are as follows:
--- /etc/smb.conf 2010/01/22 00:04:17 1.4
+++ /etc/smb.conf 2010/04/20 13:14:28
@@ -44,7 +44,7 @@
display charset = UTF-8
dos charset = 437
- vfs objects = notify_kqueue,darwinacl,darwin_streams
+ vfs objects = notify_kqueue,darwinacl
; Don't become a master browser unless absolutely necessary.
os level = 2
@@ -58,10 +58,12 @@
mangled names = no
stat cache = no
wide links = no
+ ; Preserve performance.
+ getwd cache = yes
; The darwin_streams module gives us named streams support.
- stream support = yes
- ea support = yes
+ stream support = no
+ ea support = no
; Enable locking coherency with AFP.
darwin_streams:brlm = yes
Restarting the Mac is the easiest way to make these changes take effect.
Lion (10.7) and later use smbd instead of Samba and don’t have this configuration file.
The Mac lover in me is annoyed that Apple ships poor defaults for this important function. How much do they care about Windows file sharing? The Unix geek in me is glad that the free software underpinnings of OS X are configurable enough that I can fix them by editing a couple of text files!
And if you experience a delay of several seconds when connecting to a Windows file share from a Mac, e.g. using “Go->Connect to Server”, make sure to use the full name of the Windows server. On our Active Directory network at the office, when I connected using the form “smb://servername/sharename”, there was about a 6-second delay before the share mounted. When I switched to the form “smb://servername.dom.ain/sharename”, it went down to under a second to connect.
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