[Samba] Mac OS Mavericks über slow

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 5:29 AM, chris tillian <christillian at live.com> wrote:
> Hi guys,
> we are running a fileserver for a company with ~10 Mac OS Mavericks (not all up to date).
> The Samba server is running on Centos 5 with official Samba from Centos.

Well, I see part of your problem.  The base Samba for RHEL 5, CentOS
5, Scientific Linux 5, etc., is 3.0.33. There is an update package
called 'samba3x" which will at least get you to a 3.6.6 release.
However, CentOS 5 has gotten *long* in the tooth. You should really
consider updating to at least CentOS 6, if not CentOs 7. (Personally,
I recommend Scientific Linux 7, for reasons to long to go into here.)

CentOS 6 will *at least* get you to Samba 3.6.9.

> We see big big lagging while browsing the fileserver. Some directories du to the activy of the company contains more than 4000 files (small one).


> Everything is fine if we connect with Windows or Linux machine, but with Mac Os it's a nightmare with smb.Sometimes it takes more than 5 minutes to open a directory.
> We've tried sshfs wich work seamlessly considering speed. But we would like to stick with SMB (feature wise)We've tuned anything we could within the server configuration without any results, same with the client side googling what we could.We've also try, latest Fedora and latest Samba, even Ubuntu without any results.
> Since few days, and for few Mac we see same problem even in directories with few files in it.
> Any help would be appreciated.
> C.

Start with the base Samba update, or test it on another server. Even
if there's a specific MacOS interaction killing you, I'd hope that
most of it has already been addressed by more recently releases.

The other question is, *why* are you using CIFS when you don't have
to? Modern versions of MacOS, and CentOS certainly support NFS, and
that works much better with the underlying ownership and nature of the
file system for Linux boxes in almost all environments. CIFS is useful
for cross-platform compatibility, and not necessarily good for
performance.