SMB causing freezes in Lion and Mountain Lion

[mattstocum]

Does anyone here have a good way of dealing with SMB shares in Lion and Mountain Lion? The problem we're running into is that the shares never seem to timeout when connectivity is lost. So we mount smb://server/dfs_root and that goes just fine. Clicking on any share under dfs_root goes fine, but if the connection to the server drops for any reason at all, the connection never seems to timeout, and more and more processes start locking until the entire computer reboots.

[jwojda]

we have large dfs shares here, they load infinitely faster on Wintel boxes, the macs appear to time out, however if we turn the status bar on (View - Show Status Bar), we get the pinwheel going as it appears to be enumerating the directory listings.

We've had countless tickets open with APple Enterprise support - and it appears that it needs to run down every folder path on the DFS server before it will list the structure, and each one can take several seconds - hence the delays. The more in the folders the longer it takes.

It is better than our Admit Mac days - when each folder drill down would be 5minutes... but still not the immediate response of the Wintel machines.

[mattstocum]

The issue I'm seeing is different I believe. Things are nice and fast after the initial connect, but eventually it seems to lose the connection to the server and everything freezes. The only way to get it working again is a reboot.

[lisacherie]

@mattstocum Did you find out anything further with the freezing?

Currently seeing on 10.8.x (but not 10.7.x) clients losing the share when using DFS and SMB after approximately 2 hours. The share will then appear blank in the finder, and the user needs to re-connect.