Slow AFP transfer times with 10.8.2

[billynoah]

(Posted this over in the Apple support forum as well but I like these forums so thought I'd open the topic here as well)

I've noticed since upgrading to 10.8 the transfer speeds over a LAN via AFP (File Sharing) are VERY slow.. in some instances. Based on the behaviour i'm guessing it has something to do with the amount of items.

for instance:

A folder that contains approx 122mb worth of 1500 small files takes me about 50 seconds to transfer while a long audio recording with a greater filesize of 125mb takes only 11 seconds.

using SCP from the command line the same 122mb folder took only 19 seconds while the audio took 10 seconds.

after performing the same operations on a computer running 10.6 I can deduce that the problem is on the receiving end. Audio file transfer times were the same, however the same folder of items took only 27 seconds when it was transferred to a computer running 10.6 regardless of which OS the computer sending the file was running.

apparently handling a greater number of files increases transfer time for both methods but AFP is painfully slow with 10.8 on the receiving end.

any thoughts or suggestions?

[hayne]

I don't know the answer, but a clarification seems in order.
When you talk of transfers via AFP, how exactly are you doing these transfers?
Are you using Finder? If so, the difference in copy speeds might just be a slowdown in Finder (when handling large numbers of files), not in the low-level file transfer protocol.
For example, Finder might be slowed down by having to create preview images etc for the newly copied items.

I realize that you are looking for a reason why the speed varies between OS X versions, but maybe looking at the right software component will help find the solution.
To test the low-level AFP transfer speed, you could time an operation using 'cp' on the command-line (between an AFP-mounted volume and the local disk).

[billynoah]

well Hayne, I see what you mean now and have done done experimenting. the results I'm afraid have brought up more questions than answers. I now feel very confused but hopefully this leads somewhere.. here goes:

first of all i will clearly define my setup:
router is airport extreme
I am copying between macbook pro connected via wireless
and a macpro connected to airport via ethernet cable

both are running 10.8.2

for the record, the results i posted earlier were obtained dragging and dropping files between finder windows.

i've repeated the same steps as before and now i'm not sure if i made an error before or there is some other factor i haven't taken into consideration which is affecting results here. also please note that the folder i am copying exists on a disk image on the macpro. to further complicate matters if i mount the macpro volumes via AFP and then mount the disk image over the network it results in incredibly fast transfer times... as little as 4 seconds. does this make any sense??

anyway here's a chart of times (i used code tags for a more cleanly formatted table):

source			destination		method		time
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
image (AFP mounted)	macbook pro		finder		12 sec
image (AFP mounted)	macbook pro		cp		4 sec
macbook pro		mac pro			finder		27 sec
mac pro			macbook pro		finder		48 sec
mac pro			macbook pro		cp		88 second

ok. so this is the exact same file copied by AFP over the same wireless network between the same two machines. times are just all over the board. and yes i double & triple checked all of these results.

first off, cp produced an insanely fast copy when copying from a remotely mounted disk image, but the all time slowest copy when copying from a remotely mounted hard drive.

oh..and here's another oddity... the resulting file from the extremely slow last result (macpro afp mounted hard drive to laptop via cp) was for some odd reason 155mb. i tried it four times. i even examined the folder contents and all the files in the folder were inexplicably larger than the originals. this is the only one of the 5 tests that produced this result.

please someone with some kind of inkling come help solve this puzzle. maybe one of you curious people wants to try some of these test yourself if you have a similar LAN in your home.

[hayne]

You might find my script 'testFileCopy'
(http://hayne.net/MacDev/Perl/testFileCopy)
useful for seeing what is happening.
In particular, note that you can supply /dev/null as the destination in order to factor out the speed of writing to the destination drive.

[Dyrck]

Hi,

I, too, am experiencing slow file transfers but this time in 10.8.4. Oddly moving files via Airdrop is very, very fast.