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lgarron / first-world

Issues that are not necessarily easy to report/fix, and are (generally) not a matter of life-or-death.
https://github.com/lgarron/first-world/issues
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Time Machine over SMB is *ridiculously* slow #88

Open lgarron opened 2 years ago

lgarron commented 2 years ago

This command helps:

sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0

It's not unusual for an incremental backup to take dozens of hours for no good reason, or even a full hour for minimal incremental backups.

But especially for retrieving files, it's common for me to wait for minutes just to e.g. list a folder. I usually run out of patience from trying to use the fullscreen Time Machine retrieval UI, because I can't tell if it will ever get somewhere. This makes it really impractical to retrieve files, and often I have to dig into the disk mounting details — with varying success. Backups are useless if they don't work, and macOS has such extreme performance issues that it's quite close.

lgarron commented 2 years ago

I opened up Time Machine.app for /Applications, and pulled up a backup from 7 days ago. According to my stopwatch, it took literally over 3 minutes just to show anything inside the folder (never mind the icons)

After that, I could hover over other dates and click on them, but clicking on them... did nothing. Same for the up/down buttons. Time Machine was effectively stuck.

I would have recorded a short screencap, but of course Time Machine is so screen-modal that I can't even do that.

On reflection, a significant part of this may be GitHub's corporate spyware (Carbon Black). It's probably a combination of factors, including:

Directly navigating the snapshots in the mounted .sparsebundle works best, even if it's much more annoying to look at the same folder across time. But nowadays that can freeze all of Finder.app, and I can't even mount the .sparsebundle after a fresh reboot without running into hdiutil: attach failed - Resource temporarily unavailable.

lgarron commented 2 years ago

sigh

Still an issue. I haven't completed a full SMB Time Machine backup in over a month, even though Time Machine diligently starts every hour and makes some amount of progress. Connecting exclusively over Ethernet (with WiFi turned off on the MacBook Pro) doesn't seem to help.

I still blame Carbon Black. Unfortunately, once a computer starts having such backup problems, the only way I've ever been able to resolve it is using a complete macOS reinstall, which is rather prohibitive. 😕

Also, I know it's not really the fault of the network or the NAS, because two older (and therefore slower) computers are still happily chugging along with successful backups.

lgarron commented 2 years ago

This might not help?

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/08/time-machine-initial-backup-error/