Viscosity Fast on Windows, Slow on Mac

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daleksic

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Joined: Wed Dec 23, 2020 9:21 am

Post by daleksic » Wed Dec 23, 2020 9:28 am
I bought Viscosity about a month ago with 5 licenses. 2 for PC, 3 for Mac. I set up my Mac as well as the office PCs and things work, but I was able to work a whole day on the PC and its blazing fast. We have a 400mbps connection on both ends and it feels like I'm browsing and accessing files locally. Not so on the Mac. I can't figure out what settings I need to mess with to make this more "fluent"

For example, when sending things to a printer, all 3 Macs take anywhere from 10-15 seconds just to spool the print. When accessing files, the folder content takes 5-10 seconds just to display. And most of the folders contain about 300-400 excel files. For the Mac to display the thumbnail image of the XL files, that takes maybe another 30 seconds just for the ones that are visible.

What I'm saying is, there is a big performance difference between the way viscosity performs between Mac and PC. I used openVPN before and whereas it wasn't as fast as Viscosity on the PC, its much faster on the Mac.

Any help, hint, tips and tricks would be very welcome.

Thanks.

James

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Posts: 2313
Joined: Thu Sep 04, 2008 9:27 pm

Post by James » Mon Jan 04, 2021 4:33 pm
Hi daleksic,

Firstly I recommend checking whether it is the VPN connection itself that is slow, or whether it is just SMB (the protocol used for file and printer sharing). You can use tools like "iperf" to test the speed of the tunnel (and if all traffic is routed through the VPN tunnel you can also try tools like speedtest.net).

If speed tests through the VPN connection appear to be ok, but SMB performance isn't, then you likely have a SMB configuration issue. SMB performance issues are sadly common on macOS, and largely come down to the SMB configuration on the server properly supporting macOS's SMB implementation.

My guess is it might just be SMB in this instance: the macOS implementation is very sensitive to non-local network conditions (e.g. the higher latency when connecting from an external location). Generally these issues can be resolved server-side by ensuring the server is running an up-to-date version of SMB/Samba, and that the Apple extensions are enabled (called the "vfs_fruit" extension on Samba-based SMB servers). I recommend doing an internet search for "macOS SMB performance over VPN" to find some good information on the topic.

If you find the whole VPN connection itself is slow on macOS, then there is likely an MTU issue. If the VPN connection is set to use a MTU value higher than the user's network connection supports, then it will result in dropped or fragmented packets, which will negatively affect performance. Lowering the MTU value in both the OpenVPN server and client configurations, as well as setting a "mssfix" value client-side, should resolve this issue.

MTU issues can affect some users, but not others, depending on the MTU value of their underlying Internet connection. Some technologies (like DSL and 3G/4G) typically use lower MTUs than other technologies.

Cheers,
James
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