How exactly does processing files work on AFP shares?

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I recently made myself a NAS, and I’ve been wondering about how AFP shares work.

If I have a ZIP on the AFP share, and I use Finder to decompress the file, what will the process for decompressing this file be? Will it read the file into memory on my Mac, process it, and then write the results to the AFP share? I’ve been wondering because if I login via SSH to decompress, I seem to get faster results.

Oliver Joseph Ash

Posted 2012-11-10T22:31:42.890

Reputation: 282

Answers

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Yes - almost all file sharing protocols are the same in that you will be round tripping the data to mount the share and compress or uncompress a file that is stored remotely.

AFP has no daemon that runs on the server to listen for and act upon compression requests and carry them out on the CPU that is local to the storage.

Your description of the process is correct.

bmike

Posted 2012-11-10T22:31:42.890

Reputation: 2 773

Nice one. Thank you for clearing that up. Is there a protocol that does have a daemon for this? – Oliver Joseph Ash – 2012-11-10T22:58:54.883

Not in the consumer space. When you are using proprietary storage controllers like EMC or NetApp - some snapshot and copy on write actions are offloaded to the storage subsystem, but I'm not aware of any filesystems on the consumer level that offer this. Of course GFS and other distributed file systems like AFS are more of what you seek for eliminating this data round trip delay.

– bmike – 2012-11-10T23:06:38.137

What about deleting? Deleting files and folders seems a lot faster by SSH too. – Oliver Joseph Ash – 2012-11-10T23:10:44.010

@OliverJosephAsh Deleting should generally be just as fast by other protocols as by SSH. – Darth Android – 2012-11-11T00:15:20.290

Asked: 2012-11-10T22:31:42.890

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Active: 2012-11-10T22:54:26.703