MAC clients and connection to windows network shares

@rossoneris I have found that the best thing is to not even bother with file shares Lol. But if the have to, then I have found using smb:// as appose to cifs:// seems to be faster, and, mounting the folder directly seems to be better than mounting the root directory even if it means they need to mount multiple folders.

So lets assume your shares are something like: smb://domain/fileshare
Under which you have
/departments
/projects
/potatoes
/tomatoes
Under /departments you have: /IT, /HR, /MPR, /FM etc.
Instead of just mounting smb://domain/fileshare or smb://domain/fileshare/departments it is best to go straight to smb://domain/fileshare/departments/IT or smb://domain/fileshare/departments/HR etc. The idea is, the closer you mount to the root directory in the case "fileshare" the more folders and files Finder has to list, which may take time, and make your connection appear slow.

The other possible slowness that you could be experiencing is network. Obviously if you were on a Gigabit LAN, performance would be far greater than on WiFi, that is just the nature of the beast. The third thing to consider is, the performance of your windows server(s) dishing out the shares in the first place, are they performing as expected? Then there is the storage itself, we could go on and on and on.

I prefer file sync and share platforms to be honest, they are much more convenient, but it all depends on your companies data and privacy policies. We use BOX.com, I think it is fantastic.

Hope this helps.

Kamal

Disable 'icon preview' helps..
or
Use something like "Acronis Access Connect"

Or use something like : "Acronis Access Connect"

The issue isn't so much the network connection, but the Finder. If you navigate your server share using a Finder alternative, for example Nimble Commander or Commander One (both have free options) you will see that the access and navigation is quicker. The same is true if you use the Terminal...

You could try setting a few user based settings:
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true #don't write .DS_Store files on network
echo "[default]" >> ~/Library/Preferences/nsmb.conf; echo "smb_neg=smb1_only" >> ~/Library/Preferences/nsmb.conf # Change smb negotiation

But generally this won't be that great a gain. Another trick is to keep the finder window with the network folder open, provided you don't close that window you shouldn't experience the same slowdown again as the Finder has already done the rendering and counting.

We had a lot of issues here too when we first moved from an AFP share to SMB. I've tried a lot of the tweaks that people have suggested but found going to SMB 3 was the biggest improvement for us.

Most organisations you can't use SMB1 now since Wannacry exploited it.
SMB3 seems to bring significant improvement, but there are now a bunch of slightly older OS X versions stuck in SMB2 limbo, which seems to just be horrible and not work very well especially with some of the more complicated volumes available, we have one where I think the contant is spanned and SMB2 OS X clients can see only half the contents of the share, it worked fine when we used cifs but with SMB1 gone this no longer works.

Might have a look at the icon preview option.