Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Industry Solutions and Verticals > Media and Entertainment > PowerScale OneFS: macOS Client Performance and User Experience Optimization > Where to start?
Administrators often arrive at this tuning guide when trying to solve macOS performance problems. The settings outlined in this document can be the difference between average macOS performance and exceptional performance. However, the recommendations in this paper are not intended to “fix” environments where macOS systems are in an unusable state. An exception is the change of net.inet.tcp.reass.maxqueuelen for older versions of macOS, which does make a huge difference. Also enabling flow control on the network switch can greatly improve inconsistent performance.
The good news is that a fresh install of macOS 11+ connected to a PowerScale cluster works reasonably well with no tuning whatsoever. An untuned macOS client should be able to browse the file system, open, read, and write files.
The question arises of where to start when macOS systems are slow to browse the file system, will not open or save files, and video playback is dropping frames. The trick here is to reduce complexity in the system, get back to a known good state, and work backwards to the user’s end state. Determining where the problem lies (storage, network, client) is nontrivial in the best of circumstances. The following suggestions have helped administrators track down their problems and answer those challenging questions.