10.6: Slow SMB browsing of Windows Servers fixed

May 04, '11 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: millerst

Snow Leopard only hintBy default in Mac OS X browsing to Windows 2008 and 2003 Servers is extremely slow, navigating from one directory level to the next can take a minute or longer. I utilize my Mac to access the office Windows 2008 and 2003 file servers and the speed to access these shares makes it almost impossible to work from a Mac.

To make things even worse I do most of my work through a Cisco SSL VPN loaded on my Mac from home over a broadband connection. Out of pure frustration I started playing with settings in my SMB configuration and have found a way in Mac OS 10.6.7 to speed the process up drastically to where navigating folders is almost instantaneous (including over my VPN). This makes the Mac work just as fast as my Windows 7 workstation when connecting to Windows servers.

In order to fix the slow SMB browsing you will need to edit the smb.conf file on your Mac. The file is only editable by the user root so you'll need to use a text editor that can authenticate (like BBEdit or TextWrangler) or do this in the Terminal. I did the latter. I had root enabled and used the 'su' command, but you can just use 'sudo' with your administrator account to accomplish the same thing.

Once the file has been edited and saved you will need to restart your mac for the changes to take effect. Mac OS X being Unix at the core utilizes the Samba daemon to access Windows networks and the smb.conf file controls how Samba accesses these Windows shares. 2br

This simple fix for slow SMB browsing decreased the time to open shares and files on my Windows 2008 server from my Mac drastically.

[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one. I'd suggest making a backup copy of smb.conf before trying these edits, in case you need to revert. If you use TextWrangler or BBEdit, the file you're looking to change is /private/etc/smb.conf.]

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