Slow SMB performance on Sierra

[agerson]

So apparently there are a few known bugs with SMB in Mac OS Sierra.
One is documented here:
https://dpron.com/os-x-10-11-5-slow-smb/

I applied this fix and am still experiencing dreadfully slow performance when the finder tries to list the contents of any folder over SMB. SMB works fine on my 10.11.x clients and AFP works fine on my Sierra clients. Are others finding this as well?

[chad_fox]

What version of Samba?

One solution I found was to disable Client Signing, although it comes with potential security risks.

https://www.digistor.com.au/the-latest/cat/digistor-blog/post/el-capitan-smb-trouble/

[agerson]

Yes. I tried that and it did not appear to help. I believe I am running SMB 2 on Windows server 2008 R2. You are not seeing this in your environment?

[pinnockt]

Did you ever find a solution to this @agerson ? We seem to have the same problem. Whilst the client signing solutions seem to reference a slow file transfer speed, the problem we're seeing is very slow folder enumeration and in some instances NTFS permissions are not coming through - users are denied access to folders they should have access to. Frustrating!

[agerson]

@pinnockt, I ended up creating a brand new share, booting the machine into linux to ensure no windows meta data got copied, scripted a copy of all the data to the new share, then booting back into Windows and setting up the permissions from scratch. Its not super fast, but it did improve.

[cpmac]

OS X 10.9 - 10.11: sudo sh -c "echo '[default]' >> /etc/nsmb.conf; echo 'smb_neg=smb1_only' >> /etc/nsmb.conf"

macOS 10.12 or newer: sudo sh -c "echo '[default]' >> /etc/nsmb.conf; echo 'protocol_vers_map=1' >> /etc/nsmb.conf"

[donmontalvo]

FWIW

Disable local SMB directory enumeration caching
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207520

[Alaska185]

I have not sussed this problem out, but here is some potentially useful info.

At first I though that this had the stink of a DNS timeout, but I ruled that out pretty quickly.

Below is the output from smbutil statshares -a from a client running macOS 10.12 (Sierra). I have tried various combination of turning client signing off and changing some of the TCP values, but to no avail. The client machine is linked to the 172.30.4.0/24 network thru a Checkpoint VPN server, using the built in MacOS L2TP client.

The first share called nwasg is from an iMac running Sierra. The directory listings are sub 1 sec.

The second share, nwasg_docs is to a machine running AIX v6.1 & a Samba 3.6 server. The directory listing is plus 1 min. The SAMBA build is a prebuilt that comes with the AIX distritubion and does not appear to support any protocol above SMB_1.

I believe I might solve this problem by building Samba 4+

Voila:

ACE-Mac10:~ bill$ smbutil statshares -a

SHARE ATTRIBUTE TYPE VALUE

nwasg SERVER_NAME 172.30.4.11 USER_ID 501 SMB_NEGOTIATE SMBV_NEG_SMB1_ENABLED SMB_NEGOTIATE SMBV_NEG_SMB2_ENABLED SMB_NEGOTIATE SMBV_NEG_SMB3_ENABLED SMB_VERSION SMB_3.0 SMB_SHARE_TYPE DISK SIGNING_SUPPORTED TRUE SIGNING_REQUIRED TRUE EXTENDED_SECURITY_SUPPORTED TRUE UNIX_SUPPORT TRUE LARGE_FILE_SUPPORTED TRUE OS_X_SERVER TRUE FILE_IDS_SUPPORTED TRUE FILE_LEASING_SUPPORTED TRUE MULTI_CREDIT_SUPPORTED TRUE ENCRYPTION_SUPPORTED TRUE SIGNING_ON TRUE

nwasg_docs SERVER_NAME 172.30.4.2 USER_ID 501 SMB_NEGOTIATE SMBV_NEG_SMB1_ENABLED SMB_NEGOTIATE SMBV_NEG_SMB2_ENABLED SMB_NEGOTIATE SMBV_NEG_SMB3_ENABLED SMB_VERSION SMB_1 SMB_SHARE_TYPE UNKNOWN EXTENDED_SECURITY_SUPPORTED TRUE UNIX_SUPPORT TRUE LARGE_FILE_SUPPORTED TRUE

[gknacks]

@Alaska185 did you end up testing against Samba 4, or finding another resolution?