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Speeding up Samba file copying?

by Victor Agreda, Jr. Nov 15th 2005 at 10:00AM

packetsYou know how copying large files between a Mac and PC can be so painfully slow? Part of this surely comes from some magical file allocation nonsense translation that occurs between NTFS and HFS, but plenty comes from a little neworking problem. See, according to an anonymous poster at macosxhints, TCP winds up delaying packet acknolegements, which in turn revs Samda down, which means my dang ripped movies don't copy as quickly. Er, I mean those peskly PPT files... At any rate, the tip is to turn off the delay. Sounds easy, but the method is a little scary. I have noticed my mixed-client transfers going faster in Tiger, but I'm too scared to try this one out. Anyone game?
 

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You know how copying large files between a Mac and PC can be so painfully slow? Part of this surely comes from some magical file allocation...
 

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mb

One way to improve SMB is to turn on sendfile support (i.e. on your linux box, though i don't know if you can do this on XP or 2000). Though this will break NT4, ME, and 98 clients. But who cares about that =P

November 15 2005 at 1:14 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
mb

One way to improve SMB is to turn on sendfile support (i.e. on your linux box, though i don't know if you can do this on XP or 2000). Though this will break NT4, ME, and 98 clients. But who cares about that =P

November 15 2005 at 1:14 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
kotazzu

I tried Cocktail: it has a wonderful checkbox with "turn off delayed acks" on it. Not so scary.

November 15 2005 at 12:26 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
James

Tread carefully making these changes. I went the whole hog and implemented the changes recommended by adcha in that thread, and found after I rebooted I couldn't log in! I had to boot into single user mode, fsck, mount my drive, delete /etc/sysctl.conf and reboot to get back in. Not good.

November 15 2005 at 11:30 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Andrew Holding

Samba can be really wierd, if you are doing a Linux to Mac transfere I suggest you look at http://www.evath.net/archives/mac_os_x_and_samba_too_slow.shtml It really gave me a headache till I found those results

November 15 2005 at 10:07 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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