10.9 Mavericks Slow AFP Distribution Point

[russeller]

We are planning on moving to JSS v9.2 soon and we are at the phase of testing Mavericks (10.9) as a distribution point using AFP. I've already tested a Ubuntu JDS VM and a Windows Server VM as distribution points.

It's interesting how I had the worst performance with 10.9 Server with AFP, I'm talking about 1MB/sec speeds which is really sad. Has anyone else noticed this? I've already tried installing a fresh copy of 10.9 on 2008-era Xserves and 2012 Mac Mini with a SSD drive. I don't believe this is hardware or network related, but could be something with the OS.

I also noticed how ARD 3.7 is extremely laggy as well with 10.9 systems. Not sure if that is related. Found some forums to agree with that: https://discussions.apple.com/message/23629160#23629160

Has anyone else experienced problems with this? Have you been able to resolve it?

[mibrodt]

I haven't noticed AFP being slow on my Mavericks machines, but I have noticed that I have had the same if not better performance over SMB than AFP.

ARD is really buggy though. I really wish Apple would do a major update on it already.

[sbrosnihan]

We're experiencing very slow AFP connections off of 10.9.1 distribution points and very poor ARD performance on these machines as well. We're using 8.73. We're working to resolve it. I'll post any discoveries here.

[sbrosnihan]

After a lot of goggling and testing, we've discovered that AFP/Casper in mavericks is leaving connections open after finishing a task, like imaging. These show up as 'closing' in nettop and never go away unless we restart file sharing services. When the server is in this state, throughput is inconsistent and sometimes nonexistent. SMBX (new with Mavericks) disconnects properly and has consistent bandwidth, though special characters are not allowed in the user casper account passwords. SMB, or CIFS is the fastest. Unfortunately, there's no way do differentiate between the different flavors of SMB on the JSS in 8.x or 9.x, so we're stuck with SMBX.

As for ARD and general performance, this seems related to the fact that we run our macs (minis) headless. Evidently, the GPU won't fire up without something connected. Once we connected an HDMI dongle, ARD perked up as the GPU was engaged. Mavericks uses the GPU for general tasks, so this should improve performance in general.

http://blog.macminicolo.net/post/72706369716/an-hdmi-adapter-for-a-headless-mac-mini

[andyinindy]

Has anyone reported the issue with special characters in passwords to JAMF? This seems like something that they should address...

[Chris_Hafner]

I've seen some pretty dramatic slowdowns when pre-staging from AFP after the upgrade to 10.9.x Unfortunately, we happened to completely gut our network core over the same period so I'm actually trying to dig to the bottom of this now. I wouldn't call my speeds "slow" per se. Just about half of what they used to be.

[Chris_Hafner]

Having spent the last 20 working hours trying to get to the bottom of this I have to take back my statement. It looks like a rouge 3Comm switch was causing my AFP issues. We're all running at full speed... for us anyways.