Improving OSX SMB I/O speed.

Disclaimer: Our Isilon system was setup by a third party, and kinda handed it to me out of the blue.   I'm working to fix some of the issues (no failover nic for the infiniband backend.) but it's a WIP.

So we want to be able to use SMB as our primary sharing protocol so we can do Windows & OSX sharing, along with production group passwords, auditing, ect.

Right now we're sharing /ifs/isilon as both SMB and NFS using Impersonate-overrides to fix UID/GID issues between the two. (I know, I hate it) Unfortunately 40mbps isn't acceptable to the  OSX users and I'd like give them a decent speed using SMB.  (NFS runs about the same as Windows/SMB speeds, but creates a lot of extra issues... but that's another discussion.)

Anyway, So our OSX machines have terrible SMB speed something 30%-45% of Windows Users, which for the longest time I assumed was because of Apple's poorly written version of SMB.  But with Mavericks, there's no excuse right?  Apple says, "SMB2 is superfast, increases security, and improves Windows compatibility." but I see no real evidence of this, unless they consider 40mbps "superfast."

   

Relevant Configuration.

And each node is configured with Bonded 4x 1GB ethernet ports,

And now the benchmarking -- All Benchmarking is done with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, being a decent cross-platform option for measuring read/write speed.

Windows 7 Read / Write speed

Single Bond, 103MBps, which is pretty good. Something like 825mbps, pretty healthy connection speed for single gigabit Ethernet.

OSX Mountain Lion 7 Read / Write speed

Single Bond.  Half the speed of windows.

OSX Lion DUAL BOND.

Double the bandwidth, no real speed improvement....

OSX Mavericks Read / Write.

No real improvement, surprising considering they're using SMB2 now, I would expect something at least CLOSER to Windows read/write.