Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Industry Solutions and Verticals > Media and Entertainment > PowerScale OneFS: macOS Client Performance and User Experience Optimization > Increase network memory allocation
In macOS Monterey and Ventura, the default network memory allocation has been increased making this optimization unnecessary. Before performing this optimization, check the current setting from the macOS command line:
sysctl -a | grep nmbclusters
This will return the setting for kern.ipc.nmbclusters which should be 242144 or higher. If the value of kern.ipc.nmbclusters is lower, proceed with this optimization to increase it.
On Intel based Apple hardware, after booting into recovery mode, launch the Terminal application and use the following commands to add a boot argument. This command will overwrite any existing boot-args:
nvram boot-args="ncl=262144"
This setting is the number of 2 KB clusters assigned to the network buffer and is calculated as follows:
(262,144 * 2) / 1,024 = 512 MB
After setting this nvram boot argument, reboot the macOS system for the changes to take effect. When the Mac has rebooted, run the following terminal command to verify the boot argument:
nvram boot-args
To remove boot-args settings, run the following terminal command:
nvram -d boot-args
Adding boot-args on Apple Silicon based machines requires an extra step. While booted into recovery mode, System Integrity Protection (SIP) needs to be disabled. Once SIP is disabled, reboot the machine into recovery mode a 2nd time and add the boot-args listed above. Once set, reboot the machine into recovery mode a 3rd time and re-enable SIP protection. Thankfully, this process is probably unnecessary as Apple has increased the default kern.ipc.nmbclusters value for Monterey and Ventura.