OSX 10.3.4-Please Help V.Slow Browse of Win2k Server

[Gareth Hillary]

Please Help,

We have a network of around 35 Macs of various flavours ranging from a
Beige Powermac G3 right up to 7 Brand new G5's. We use a new HP
Proliant file Server with 1GB RAM running Windows 2000 SP4. The file
server's structure is well organised with diferent deparments saving
to different directories.

With the new G5's running OS X 10.3.3 I am finding huge problems with
their ability to browse the network volume. The client machines
connect to the server using AFP/IP with a direct IP address (rather
than browsing for the server etc).

When a user opens a folder in collumns view it takes far to long to
display the folder contents. The more items the longer it takes, as if
it is calculating the sizes or creating previews or something.

HOWEVER

If you then go to a different folder on the server (and experience the
same tedious delay) when you go back to the original folder it the
contents, sizes and icons appear quickly as if they have been Cached.

SO my question would be how can this Caching (if it is that) be
prevented.

At present it is quicker to browse the server on a Beige G3 running OS
9.2.2 than it is on a G5 with 1.25 Gig of RAM which is LUDICROUS......

Are there some network protocols to switch to anywhere. I read
somewhere that Windows 2003 is better (what substantiates this??). Do
we need more RAM in the Server....

Anyone who can help on this please contact me at
(e-mail address removed) or reply to this post.

In anticipation of a positive response,

Best regards,


Gareth

 

[William Smith]

At present it is quicker to browse the server on a Beige G3 running OS
9.2.2 than it is on a G5 with 1.25 Gig of RAM which is LUDICROUS......

Are there some network protocols to switch to anywhere. I read
somewhere that Windows 2003 is better (what substantiates this??). Do
we need more RAM in the Server....

Hi Gareth!

The problem you're seeing is an inherent problem with Mac OS X and
server browsing. Due to the architecture of the Mac OS X system,
browsing is just very slow. You probably have nothing misconfigured nor
do you have much you can do to optimize this. This is one of the reasons
our environment has held off from upgrading.

I'm not familiar with how Mac OS X clients connecting to a Mac OS X
server respond but if I had to guess as to why browsing is slow from Mac
OS X 10.3.x to a Windows server I'd suspect it's because Windows server
still uses AFP 2.2 for Mac file sharing. The AFP protocol used by
today's Macs is up to 3.x. (This is a guess only.)

You may want to look into a third party AFP solution for your server
such as ExtremZ-IP from <http://www.grouplogic.com>. You can download a
trial version of the software to see if it meets your needs.

Hope this helps! bill

 

[Mr. Me]

Hello,
I can only add to this.
I have heard of two occurrences so far where our customers have the same
issues. One of them has two Windows 2000 servers, one with SP3, one with
SP4. AppleTalk browsing from OS 9.x is really fast, but from any OsX
machine the customer reports that he sees the beach ball for about 100
seconds before he can even move the scroll bar. This only seems to
happen when there is a large number of files in the folder (more than
200) and also only on the server with SP4 installed (which might just be
because this server has a huge number of files/folders being served by
SFM - about 200.000). Browsing with SFM is normal, but not a choice in
this environment. We have also tried to destroy the Mac volume index on
the Windows side (dir > d:\:afp_idindex ) without any luck.

Questions:
-can other users report the same problem and point out similarities?
-did something change in SP4 with regards to AFP?
-will Microsoft ever change over to a newer version of AFP to address
these (and numerous other) issues?
-Is there anything on the OsX side we can change?

Thanks!

 

[Jonathan Tolmach]

Gareth,
I read with interest your problem and replies, as we were having the same
problem until a few minutes ago. We also had problems with the 31
character file name limit. There is an Aug 3 post and reply about that.
William Smith suggested connecting via smb instead of afp. That cured both
of our ills.

 

[neopro]

Hello,

I need to add as well. To keep in mind that there are certain Macs apps that require resource forks. SMB is not the cure for all.

Those who complain the most
publishers, researchers, and just add to those high end apps..

word, excel and other basic storage just use SMB for security and data integrity reasons otherwise third party apps is the way to protect your users.

just me