Listing some directories in the Finder, even those with just a handful of items can take 30 seconds or more. Others show their contents in under 1 second. I can stream video and transfer files without issue. I get the same issue with both AFP and SMB.
This is screwing me up most when I try to add music to my iTunes library which is hosted on the FS. It takes something like 5-10 minutes to add one album. When I try to list the directory in Finder it initially takes more than 30 seconds to load. Some subdirectories took as long as 1m40s to load!
Any ideas of what I can do to speed things up?
DroboProFS (about 30% of capacity used) with current firmware
Current MacBook Pro 17", 8gb RAM, Mac OS 10.6.6
Connected with AFP
Gigabit connection from Drobo to switch and Mac to switch
I turned off calculate all sizes, turned off firefly (wasn’t working anyway) and restarted the Drobo. My music directory (2,300 subfolders) took over 2 minutes to load.
I figured it might have been a caching issue post restart, so after the first load I switched to another user. It took 1m40s to load it there.
The first time I opened my music folder I got the same thing. It contains 1600 folders, and it took a few minutes to list. Ater the first time I opens in 10 sec, but is very slow and bogs down the Finder for a few minutes until it refreshes the listing. I guess this is lay of the land.
I just tried mounting the shares as SAMBA. This is faster than the Apple File Protocol. However, since this was the first time I used SAMBA on it, I can see the smbd deamon running at 80% CPU now. Probably indexing for a cache.
Try it by pressing Apple+K in the Finder, then this address format:
I enabled ‘wide links’ in the samba.cnf and mounted as SMB again which sped up the directory listing to 20-25 seconds on first load. Additional loads are about 1 second.
So I then fired up iTunes to see if I can get music to copy any faster. I switched it to point to the SMB share, unmounted the AFP share to be sure and copied a few albums. It’s still painfully slow… 4-5 minutes per album when I add new content. They’re only about 70mb each.