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scottstuff.net0 Hot0 comments21 min read
Making Davinci Resolve Faster: Speeding Up SMB Reads From MacOS to Linux
So, this is one of those dumb-but-annoying problems: my home NAS wasn’t fast enough to stream high-resolution raw video to my Mac Studio without the playback suffering.1I’ve always jokingly referred to this sort of thing as a zero-th world problem — the sort of tech problem that only arises when you’re trying to do somewhat rediculous things with cutting-edge tech that honestly probably isn’t needed at all. This meant that I couldn’t edit video directly from the NAS in Davinci Resolve without pain. Now, I’ll admit that I’m editing very large video files — mostly 30 FPS 12k video from a Blackmagic Pyxis 12k. The files are well over 1 TB/hour, and I’m trying to edit them directly without using proxies or pre-rendering anything. But I’m also doing all of this on very fast computers, over a very fast network, and it still wasn’t able to keep up. I’m using a Mac Studio M3 Ultra, which was about as fast of a Mac as you could buy until last week. The NAS is a Linux server with 256 GB of RAM, a 22-core CPU, and 56 hard drives in a very large ZFS array. Everything is connected together with a mix of 40G and 100G Ethernet links. Locally, I’m able to write large files to disk at over 4 GB/sec and read at over 1.5 GB/sec. Yet when I tried to read or write from the Mac, I was lucky to get 400 MB/sec writing and 250 MB/sec reading. I’ve had this problem (or variants of this problem) for a long time, and I’ve made multiple attempts to fix it, but it’s been rather resistant to analysis. I’d never managed to figure out where the actual bottleneck was, although I was fairly confident that MacOS’s lousy SMB client was a big part of it.2This is like saying that water is wet or Windows is prone to malware — trivially true but not actually helpful in any way. About the best thing that you can say about disk I/O on Macs is that it’s usually not that bad in practice. It’s rarely actually good, and Linux on similar hardware usually runs rings around it. I’d had somewhat similar problems when I was using a Linux system as a client over NFS, though, so the problem probably wasn’t entirely MacOS’s fault. I ended up spending hours yesterday working on this while doing some catalog reorganization, and I’ve finally figured out most of what was wrong. The short answer: MacOS’s SMB client combined with ZFS’s default settings were seriously hamstringing the systems’ ability to work with large files. It took 2 reboots, one kernel upgrade, a bunch of tuning, and an unknown number of Fable 5.1 tokens, but everything is fast enough now, and I’m able to play back 12k 30 FPS video without skipping. Hang on, and I’ll explain what was happening and how to fix it.
Source: https://scottstuff.net/posts/2026/09/07/davinci-resolve-mac-linux-nas. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.
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