MacOS in Business Environment

[limok]

Hi Guys

 

Just wanted some advice on users who may have some experience in this scenario.

 

We're a business with predominantly PCs but do have a department with around 30 Mac users. We're always hearing complaints of server is slow, search is slow and general productivity isn't great.

 

Users are mainly working on artwork files built in Adobe CC and it's not uncommon that files can potentially be very large. for example an Adobe Illustrator file can be around 125MB but can have linked tiff files in them which can make the file be a couple of gigs.

 

hardware is a Mac Mini that is connected to storage via thunderbolt 2 to a raid 5 Areca box. internal speeds are great 200MB+ read speeds. The mini is connected to a switch at 10Gb and individual clients are connected at a gig. Mini has Mojave installed

 

connections are made via AFP from clients that are on Mojave or High Sierra.

 

Cheers,

[adrynalyne]

  On 08/03/2019 at 09:42, limok said:

Hi Guys

 

Just wanted some advice on users who may have some experience in this scenario.

 

We're a business with predominantly PCs but do have a department with around 30 Mac users. We're always hearing complaints of server is slow, search is slow and general productivity isn't great.

 

Users are mainly working on artwork files built in Adobe CC and it's not uncommon that files can potentially be very large. for example an Adobe Illustrator file can be around 125MB but can have linked tiff files in them which can make the file be a couple of gigs.

 

hardware is a Mac Mini that is connected to storage via thunderbolt 2 to a raid 5 Areca box. internal speeds are great 200MB+ read speeds. The mini is connected to a switch at 10Gb and individual clients are connected at a gig. Mini has Mojave installed

 

connections are made via AFP from clients that are on Mojave or High Sierra.

 

Cheers,

Expand  

As a server? Well there is your problem. 

[+Eternal Tempest MVC]

Are these the new mac mini's Nov 2018 or latter or the previous models?

The previous model was still using hardware from 2014.

[adrynalyne]

  On 08/03/2019 at 13:12, Eternal Tempest said:

Are these the new mac mini's Nov 2018 or latter or the previous models?

The previous model was still using hardware from 2014.

Expand  

Considering the TB2 connectivity, I am pretty sure not one of the new ones. 

[fusi0n]

I've ran into this issue.

https://dpron.com/os-x-10-11-5-slow-smb/

 

This fixed it. 

[limok]

Its the 2014 one.

 

But the server is a glorified file server, not doing anything else. 

 

Done a speed test on the thunderbolt raid server and getting around 500MB reads. 

 

I'm not thinking it's that. 

 

I have noticed that indexing isn't completing and that since Wednesday morning we have had around 27TB of disk reads and 2.7TB of network reads. 

 

This has to be software related?

 

@fusion I'll take a look into that link.

 

Cheers,

  On 08/03/2019 at 13:17, fusi0n said:

I've ran into this issue.

https://dpron.com/os-x-10-11-5-slow-smb/

 

This fixed it. 

Expand  

We're using AFP not SMB as all clients are Macs. 

[fusi0n]

  On 08/03/2019 at 13:57, limok said:

Its the 2014 one.

 

But the server is a glorified file server, not doing anything else. 

 

Done a speed test on the thunderbolt raid server and getting around 500MB reads. 

 

I'm not thinking it's that. 

 

I have noticed that indexing isn't completing and that since Wednesday morning we have had around 27TB of disk reads and 2.7TB of network reads. 

 

This has to be software related?

 

@fusion I'll take a look into that link.

 

Cheers,

We're using AFP not SMB as all clients are Macs. 

Expand  

Just because the clients are macs, doesn't mean they are connecting via the AFP protocol. I would triple check that. I "forced" afp, and it was actually still using smb.

[limok]

Ended up doing a spotlight rebuild (again) and forcing users to use SMB instead. I'm still not 100% confident the issue is fixed although speeds have normalised. 

 

Cheers,

[UKer]

I had a similar problem in the past and it was due to a bad WiFi router that the clients were connecting to (supplied by the local telco). Switched it for a decent one and all everything started to run as fast as expected.