file sharing painfully slow

[Karl Kuehn]

On Mar 20, 2007, at 4:08 PM, Andy Ringsmuth wrote:

> I've always thought Apple should have a preference somewhere like  
> "disable custom icons on network disks."  That way one could simply  
> check a little box, perhaps in Finder Preferences, and then it'd be  
> so much faster on remote connections.
>
> I'm frustrated with this at times too, such as when I connect to my  
> office server from home or from a hotel room.  PAINFULLY slow.  I  
> think Apple doesn't realize that just because Steve Wozniak had a  
> T1 line in his home when most people had 2400bps modems doesn't  
> mean we all have bandwidth up the wazoo.

	I have requested things like this before. And it is not just a  
bandwidth thing, I think it is more of a latency thing. I  
occasionally use a AFP server that is halfway across the country, but  
we are both sitting on top (literally) of Internet2 connections, so  
bandwidth is not an issue. Even then it feels slow, which tells me  
that it is more of a serial latency issue.
	Sometimes I will navigate to where I want with command-line  
utilities, and then use a "open ." command to get there in the finder.

	Now, it should be mentioned that we Mac users are somewhat fortunate  
that AFP has proven to be good-enough for cross-internet ad-hock file  
sharing connections. No one ever talks about using SMB/CIFS for that  
sort of thing (without some sort of VPN doing most of the work), and  
the thought of using NFS for this sort of thing makes my head hurt.  
The only really good competitor that I am aware of is AFP (Andrew  
File Protocol), and that comes with its own baggage.

	Lets hope that while Apple was in there adding the code for **NDA  
BLOCKOUT** in 10.5 that they improved AFP's high latency performance  
as well... *grin*

--
		Karl Kuehn
			larkost at softhome.net