Network speed fix
For as long as I can remember I have had issues with the speed of transferring files between my mac (laptop / imac) and the windows XP machine I have. It would take what seemed an eternity to copy files and was so slow in most cases that I simple didn’t bother and found it easier to burn the info on a cd and put it in the other computers drive… silly eh?
Anyway, through the power of google I stumbled across a [post](http://echeng.com/journal/2006/09/13/mac-os-x-slow-network-performance-to-windows-xp/) on [Eric Cheng's site](http://echeng.com) which had the following solution.
1. Disable IPv6 on Mac OS X (System Preferences->Network->Configure->Configure IPv6->Off)
2. Uninstall ipv6 on Windows XP via command line:
netsh interface ipv6 uninstall
3. On MAC OS X, set ACK no delay by adding:
socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY
to your /etc/smb.conf file.
I did exactly this and now my network is running a heck of a lot faster!
Do you think it’s specifically a Mac<->XP thing? I thought my computer took ages to copy things from yours when I brought it over, too… but that was a long time ago, I’m probably confused :p
Not necessarily a mac thing, I think it’s more a network card thing. More reading suggests that some network cards have problems with the IPv6 packets. Only thing I can think of is that the onboard network card I have was causing the delays.
My old PC, and the new on, had the same variant of network card.
I could copy from mac to mac with no problem at all. It was only when having a PC involved that problems occur.
where can i find the “smb.conf” file?
@JL Finder > Go… /etc
I also was having problems with very slow transfers when writing to an SMB network drive. Turning off IPv6 seems to have fixed the problem. In Leopard, 10.5:
System Preferences -> Network -> Advanced -> TCP/IP -> Configure IPv6: OFF (not “Automatically”)
Did not need to reconfigure /etc/smb.conf