Networking Problem

I have a Mac Pro running OSX 10.5.8 on a network with a four-year-old PC running Windows 7. Both machines are networked together and share a network drive that I render to from After Effects and other programs.

I feel that the mac is much slower on the network. It takes about five times longer to view files in directories on the network drive ( for example a directory with 4000 files will take about a full minute to load from the Mac, and about 10 seconds to load from the PC).

Also renderings from After Effects are taking about five times longer despite speed of this machine. I am getting "file not found" errors when previewing, clips on the Mac.

Any ideas?

Thanks for reading!

Are they connected to a Gigabit switch? Are you using CAT6 cables on both machines? How long are the cable runs?

both are connected to a switch, a DLINK DGS 100 5D, yes I think this is a Gigabit switch. Yes I am using CAT6 cables on both machines. The cables are identical on both machines, and about 3 yards long.

Yep, that is a Gigabit switch. What is the drive shared from? The Windows machine itself or do you have a standalone server?

it's a standalone. A Buffalo Link Station.

oliverwolfson said:

it's a standalone. A Buffalo Link Station.

Click to expand...

My guess would be that it's using SMB as a network protocol and you may need to do some tweaks to improve the performance. I did some googling with the search terms "tweak Mac OS X for SMB performance" and ran into this article:

Mac OS X slow network performance to Windows XP | Eric Cheng’s Journal

You may want to give that a shot, but be prepared to reverse it in the event that it doesn't yield better performance.