Hello, I hope someone will be able to help with configuring my mac for acceptable file transfer performance.

 

I currently use a Macbook Pro to access mainly movies, music, and pictures. I've always found file transfers slow, but as someone new to Mac, I just sort of shrugged it off as something to look into at a later date. Copying 1 GB of FLAC (lossless audio) files from unraid to the Desktop of my mac takes about 90 to 120 minutes.  When I was showing off unraid to a friend on her new Vista laptop, transferring the same 1 GB of music only took 33 minutes.  My first inclination that it was a problem with the hardware of my Mac.  Just to experiment, I installed Parallels, and my licensed copy of Windows XP on the Macbook. Imagine my surprise when I connected to my unraid box via parallels and copied the exact same files on the exact same hardware in just under 35 minutes!

 

What settings do I need to implement on my Mac to rectify this? I've read numerous threads campaigning for afp to be part of Unraid, which would be awesome, but for now, I would at least like to be able to have the same performance as windows users via SAMBA.

 

 

Just for reference, I have no experience with Macs, but if a transfer of a gigabyte took longer than 5 minutes on my ordinary (not high performance) setup, I would know that something was terribly wrong.  You should be able to copy a gigabyte from unRAID in less than 45 seconds.  I can't even imagine taking 35 minutes!  90 to 120 minutes?!?!?!

 

The first big factor is what kind of networking, gigabit? fast Ethernet? wireless? what kind of wireless, and at what average speed?

Wow, so definitely some serious networking problems.

 

The transfer estimates that I gave were made over wireless on both the Macbook and the Windows Vista machine.  Both connect to a 500GB Time Capsule, which is essentially an Aiport Extreme with a buit in Hard Drive. It supports wireless N as well as wired Gigabit. The Unraid box is gigabit as well. The Macbook Pro reports a connection at 130Mb/s. The Vista machine reports a wireless connection at 72Mb/s

 

I telneted into my unraid box during both file transfers and ran ethtool -S eth0 to make sure there were no errors and verify that the unraid box was autonegotiating with the Time Capsule at 1000Mb/s which it was. I will do a wired test as soon as my box finishes its parity check.

So I've tried transfers on both machines wired through the Time Capsule, and both seem to transfer 1GB of files in about 3 minutes.  So now problem there.  Are there any basic configurations settings I can do to optimize Samba on my mac. Simple tasks such as waiting for volumes to mount and browsing directories seem agonizingly slow compared to a XP/Vista machine.  Or is the only way to get the performance on par is AFP/Avahi support?

For some networks setting the nameserver and hosts entry will help.  You will need to change the very first line to be the IP address of your nameserver.

 

nameserver_ip="192.168.2.1"
grep $nameserver_ip /etc/resolv.conf >/dev/null 2>&1
if [ $? = 1 ]
then
        echo "nameserver $nameserver_ip" >>/etc/resolv.conf
fi

 

#!/bin/bash

# Fixes /etc/hosts with proper hostname information

HOSTNAME=`hostname`

if grep $HOSTNAME /etc/hosts >/dev/null
   then echo "hostname: '$HOSTNAME' already in hosts. skipping"
        exit
fi

# Remove this crappy entry.
grep -v 'darkstar.example.net' < /etc/hosts > /tmp/hosts

# Get current ifconfig information and use it to get address
ifconfig | awk -vhostname="$HOSTNAME" ' {
    # inet addr:192.168.1.178  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
    # $1   $2                  $3                   $4
    if ( /inet addr:/ && /Bcast:/ && /Mask:/ ) {
        addr=$2
        gsub("addr:","",addr);
        printf("%s\t%s\n",addr,hostname);
    }
} '  >> /tmp/hosts

if ! grep $HOSTNAME /tmp/hosts > /dev/null
   then printf "127.0.0.1\t%s\n" $HOSTNAME >> /tmp/hosts
fi

cat /tmp/hosts > /etc/hosts
rm -f /tmp/hosts

OK, Thanks for the tips.  I've applied the changes and they seem to help marginally when the laptop is connected wired.  Directory The wireless issue still remains.  Accessing the server wirelessly from the mac is exceptionally slow. Accessing the sever using the same hardware running a virtualized windows environment (xp on parallels) is over 300 percent faster. It's at the point where just pulling a vacation photo off the server can take up to 90 seconds.  Still no idea why

I get pretty good SMB performance with my Macbook Pro (17" Core Duo, 10.5.5) - not sure why yours is running so slow.

 

One thing that might be worth trying is firing up the activity monitor, setting the bottom tab to Network,  and watching the graph. With a parity drive in place & gige to the unraid, I tend to get 30MB peaks, with a min of ~5MB and average ~10-15MB or so.  I wonder if you're getting really high spikes, but then the connection goes dead for a while...?  Something like that was happening to me on the windows side, though power-cycling my gige switches resolved the problem.

 

Transfers will be somewhat slower over wireless - even if you use the 5GHz band w/ 802.11N, I think you'll peak out around 10MB or so -- unfortunately, I don't have my wireless network up right now, so I can't verify that, but those seem to be the numbers I got last time.

 

I had exactly the same problem with my mac (core2duo 17" mbp) and unRAID box. Wired transfers are absolutely fine, but wireless was next to useless. I'd have to wait quite a while to get directory listings, transferring files was an exercise in futility!

But i installed a new hard drive in the laptop a few days ago and running on a fresh install of leopard the transfers seem to work fine. They're fairly slow but definitely do-able.