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I've never heard that, but I also don't use SMB heavily (especially over Wifi) to begin with.

Is there a site you can point to that details the protocol's latency-sensitivity?

If something like bulk file transfer is at issue, a ping test with sizes closer to the MTU (e.g. 1480 bytes) would be a closer simulation of those latencies.

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It's just what I've experienced myself when copying a lot of files. E.g. "add 50k photos from network drive to Photos" or "perform initial Time Machine backup". Over cable I'd say it's at least twice as fast, haven't done any measurements though.

That also raises the question of if it's implementation-dependent (especially if Apple optimizes AFP over everything else), rather than generally applicable to SMB, not that this would negate the validity of the example.

> Over cable I'd say it's at least twice as fast

That could be be because of the bandwidth difference, if wireless isn't 802.11ac (or if the cable isn't 100Mb/s).

Is it also the case that copying a single file of comparable size doesn't show the same speedup?

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