Windows Server 2012 R2 performance for Mac OS X Clients (File Services)

Question

I am inheriting a Windows 2012 R2 Server that is experiencing abysmal SMB/CIFS performance for Mac OS X Clients in particular. The server is doing file services and is an Active Directory Domain Controller (one of two for the domain). It is the PDC emulator. The other domain controller is a Windows 2003 Server.

The client side environment is a mix of Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks machines. All machines are on the same physical and logical gigabit LAN. Windows 7 users experience performance within expectations. Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks clients experience abysmal performance including: slow directory listing, traversal, file reads, and file writes. There appears to be a significant asymmetry in read/write performance where write performance is significantly slower.

We have tried forcing the OS X Clients to use SMBv1 and CIFS, as opposed to the newer SMBX/SMB2 implementation. The issue persists for all versions. We have also installed Thursby DAVE for testing. There is slight alleviation of the listing/traversal performance, but it is still unacceptably slow.

I mounted a share and used dd to read /dev/random and write a 1GB text file to the share. Write performance was .33 Mbps. I ran tcpdump during the write to capture the communications.Please excuse the lack of formatting - I cannot seem to back tick escape this block:

EDIT I enabled NFS Server for Windows Server and mounted on a Mac OS X client. I conducted the same dd test captioned above with similar results/performance.

---

15:45:45.221337 IP 10.0.1.53.59596 > server.example.local.microsoft-ds: Flags [.], ack 102, win 32767, options [nop,nop,TS val 1279665835 ecr 242798971], length 0
15:45:45.221546 IP 10.0.1.53.59596 > server.example.local.microsoft-ds: Flags [.], seq 1:501, ack 102, win 32768, options [nop,nop,TS val 1279665835 ecr 242798971], length 500WARNING: Packet is continued in later TCP segments
SMB PACKET: SMBwriteX (REQUEST)
15:45:45.221547 IP 10.0.1.53.59596 > server.example.local.microsoft-ds: Flags [.], seq 501:1001, ack 102, win 32768, options [nop,nop,TS val 1279665835 ecr 242798971], length 500SMB-over-TCP packet:(raw data or continuation?)
15:45:45.221547 IP 10.0.1.53.59596 > server.example.local.microsoft-ds: Flags [.], seq 1001:1501, ack 102, win 32768, options [nop,nop,TS val 1279665835 ecr 242798971], length 500SMB-over-TCP packet:(raw data or continuation?)
15:45:45.221547 IP 10.0.1.53.59596 > server.example.local.microsoft-ds: Flags [.], seq 1501:2001, ack 102, win 32768, options [nop,nop,TS val 1279665835 ecr 242798971], length 500SMB-over-TCP packet:(raw data or continuation?)
15:45:45.221548 IP 10.0.1.53.59596 > server.example.local.microsoft-ds: Flags [.], seq 2001:2501, ack 102, win 32768, options [nop,nop,TS val 1279665835 ecr 242798971], length 500SMB-over-TCP packet:(raw data or continuation?)
15:45:45.221548 IP 10.0.1.53.59596 > server.example.local.microsoft-ds: Flags [.], seq 2501:3001, ack 102, win 32768, options [nop,nop,TS val 1279665835 ecr 242798971], length 500SMB-over-TCP packet:(raw data or continuation?)
15:45:45.221549 IP 10.0.1.53.59596 > server.example.local.microsoft-ds: Flags [.], seq 3001:3501, ack 102, win 32768, options [nop,nop,TS val 1279665835 ecr 242798971], length 500SMB-over-TCP packet:(raw data or continuation?)
15:45:45.221549 IP 10.0.1.53.59596 > server.example.local.microsoft-ds: Flags [.], seq 3501:4001, ack 102, win 32768, options [nop,nop,TS val 1279665835 ecr 242798971], length 500SMB-over-TCP packet:(raw data or continuation?)
15:45:45.221550 IP 10.0.1.53.59596 > server.example.local.microsoft-ds: Flags [.], seq 4001:4501, ack 102, win 32768, options [nop,nop,TS val 1279665835 ecr 242798971], length 500SMB-over-TCP packet:(raw data or continuation?)
15:45:45.221550 IP 10.0.1.53.59596 > server.example.local.microsoft-ds: Flags [.], seq 4501:5001, ack 102, win 32768, options [nop,nop,TS val 1279665835 ecr 242798971], length 500SMB-over-TCP packet:(raw data or continuation?)
15:45:45.221551 IP 10.0.1.53.59596 > server.example.local.microsoft-ds: Flags [.], seq 5001:5501, ack 102, win 32768, options [nop,nop,TS val 1279665835 ecr 242798971], length 500SMB-over-TCP packet:(raw data or continuation?)

EDIT

1. What next troubleshooting steps might I take to isolate a potential cause?
2. Can anything be derived from the above captioned tcpdump?
3. Are there any suggested network performance tuning recommendations to alleviate the performance issues described?

Solution 1

Try disabling SMB 3.0 on the server and see if performance improves. Disabling SMB 3.0 isn't a great idea, especially if the server is running as a store point for Hyper-V VMs or SQL data stores, but you might get away with it if you're using it in a fairly basic way.

Detect, enable and disable SMBv1, SMBv2, and SMBv3 in Windows and Windows Server | Microsoft Support

Solution 2

This link helped me a lot: Integrate Macs into a Windows Active Directory domain | TechRepublic

It basically states that you need to modify the Directory Services Settings on the Macs. Go to System Preferences/Users & Groups and click Login Options. Click the edit button for Network Account Server and then "Open Directory Utility" Modify the settings to suit your needs.

Double click "Active Directory" and go to Advanced Options:

• "Force local home directory on startup disk" will "force the creation of a profile on the local HDD for all users"
• "Use UNC path from Active Directory to derive network home location" check and select protocol used - smb
• "Mappings, which pertains to specifying unique GUIDs for certain attributes used within ADDS to identify a computer object account. OS X will generate these at random by default when bound to the domain; however, you may wish to use a particular set as generated by your enterprise admin."