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Apple systems running macOS are widely used in environments where PowerScale OneFS is the primary shared storage platform. This guide provides performance-tuning, and user-experience tweaks focused on macOS 11 (Big Sur), macOS 12 (Monterey), and macOS 13 (Ventura) when used with PowerScale OneFS 9.x.
The tunings in this guide provide advice for controlling macOS behavior when interacting with PowerScale storage. It is meant to allow administrators the ability squeeze the maximum performance out of the Apple client. Usually, the settings in this guide will not “fix” an environment where performance is unstable or unusable. In those cases, there are likely issues going on that are beyond the tuning advice in this guide. See troubleshooting advice in the section macOS network storage performance issues for some recommendations.
Historically, many optimizations were necessary on macOS to achieve maximum performance from network storage. These included adjustments such as Send and Receive Windows, Window Scaling, Inflight Bandwidth Calculation, TCP Slow Start, and others. Fortunately, many such optimizations are no longer necessary due to improvements in how macOS dynamically autotunes its network performance.
The following performance optimizations and user experience changes are covered in this document:
No single optimization is right for every environment. To take advantage of the tuning parameters outlined in this paper, testing is critical to determine how each change affects the performance of storage clients and their unique workloads.