Filed under: Software, Tips and tricks, Freeware, Internet, UNIX / BSD
Speeding up Samba file copying?
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 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?
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Andrew Holding said 10:11AM on 11-15-2005
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
Reply
James said 11:32AM on 11-15-2005
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.
Reply
kotazzu said 12:27PM on 11-15-2005
I tried Cocktail: it has a wonderful checkbox with "turn off delayed acks" on it.
Not so scary.
Reply
marin said 5:06PM on 11-16-2005
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
Reply
marin said 1:15PM on 11-15-2005
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
Reply