Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Industry Solutions and Verticals > Media and Entertainment > PowerScale OneFS: macOS Client Performance and User Experience Optimization > Configure ServerPerfMode (Intel Macs only)
ServerPerfMode updates various sysctl settings in macOS to increase system resources available to the network stack. While the name suggests that this setting is aimed at Apple systems being used as servers, testing has shown that client systems also benefit by enabling ServerPerfMode. In one example, a video file in the Canon C200 codec at 50 MBps (400mbps) would not play back smoothly until ServerPerfMode was enabled. The system dropped frames despite both the Apple hardware and PowerScale storage providing more than enough performance, and other heavier codecs playing fine.
Apple does not provide specific documentation about all the changes enabled by ServerPerfMode. The only documentation about how to enable it is: Turn on performance mode for macOS Server.
There is some discussion online about some of the sysctl changes that take place, such as this discussion on apple.stackexchange.com. The exact changes may largely depend on the total amount of RAM in the Apple system. One way to check would be to run the command sysctl -a from the CLI before and after the change, dumping the output to two text files to compare.
To enable ServerPerfMode, boot the Apple client system into Recovery Mode. When in Recovery Mode, run the following command from the Terminal application (existing boot arguments will be overwritten):
nvram boot-args=”serverperfmode=1”