achinoam01: 10.6: Slow SMB browsing of Windows Servers fixed

Thursday, May 5, 2011

10.6: Slow SMB browsing of Windows Servers fixed

By 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 fi ...