I’ve finally got tired of how bad the latency and transfer speeds are when mounting my TrueNas SMB shares on my macbook. I looked online for some solutions, but didn’t really have much success with them. I managed to get to this command that seems to be a lot better:
mount_smbfs -o soft,nobrowse "//<username>@<domain or ip>/apps" "$HOME/mnt/apps"
where /mnt/apps is a directory that I created for myself. In this case I’m mounting a share called “apps”. For now it actually seems to be pretty responsive and loads directories and files at an acceptable speed.
Why is this better than what you do with the Finder GUI? I’d just like to understand the mechanism.
there seems to be issues with the apple silicon smb implementation that’s absolutely abysmal and painful in performance. But once I mounted the shares this way, it became tolerable even in finder
Ah, if it’s limited to Apple silicon maybe that’s why. Ive never noticed any particular speed problems on any of my Macs (2004 or so through 2019)
from what I’ve read online, it’s only Apple silicon, not Intel macs
It’s difficult to know of any random person is differentiating between Intel Macs or not when they say Apple silicon these days. This is the first I’ve heard of this.
I experience SMB slowness over the internet, but not locally, on my Intel and ARM Macs. (I’m forced to use smb over the internet via VPN for work.)
I’m gonna try these commands sometime this week to see if it improves things.
I regularly get 100-200MByte/sec throughput to the Linux, Mac, and Synology SMB servers in my home
My SMB slowness has always been when copying a lot of files, the Finder does something really slow and weird when trying to figure out if the destination can be copied to (dunno if it’s checking for existing files with the same name or what). Once the actual transfer is going it’s fast, but then it hits the next file and pauses for several seconds while it’s doing something
I’ll have to do some perf tests to see if the client seems slower than others with small io/metadata.
But that has definitely always been the weakest area of networked storage - small, transactional workloads. Latency is the killer there, and there’s always going to be higher latency than local storage (although some of the super low latency expensive rdma stuff gets pretty close).
The way to mitigate that is to do copies that are multithreaded. Unfortunately most consumer file copiers out there are terrible at this. rclone definitely will do it but is CLI. Parallel rsync is also possible from CLI and works great but need utilities. I like Carbon Copy Cloner personally which at least kicks off 2 rsyncs
Edit: Apparently freefilesync will also do parallel copies and is at least GUI and somewhat user friendly. I haven’t tried it, though. Or at least not for a super long time.