Optimizing SMB settings for your Terminal Servers

shawn@shawnbass.com — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 15:54:22 GMT

Michel Roth has written a nice article about tuning file server performance. The Windows Performance Team has recently blogged about settings that can be tuned for Windows Explorer to reduce the amount of SMB traffic generated. These would be great settings to apply to a Terminal Server environment since you have a lot of instances of Windows Explorer or File Open/Save dialogs running that could create a lot of SMB traffic.

Some of the suggested optimizations would disable the following Windows Explorer behaviors:

Searches for Desktop.ini files used for folder customization
Periodic refreshes of folder contents
Searches for supporting library (.dll) files
Individual file details and attributes pulled for each file
Thumbnail extraction

And the settings to accomplish these changes are as follows:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\Explorer]
"UseDesktopIniCache"=dword:00000001
"NoRemoteRecursiveEvents"=dword:00000001
"NoRemoteChangeNotify"=dword:00000001
"StartRunNoHOMEPATH"=dword:00000001
"NoRecentDocsNetHood"=dword:00000001
"NoDetailsThumbnailOnNetwork"=dword:00000001
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MRXSmb\Parameters]
"InfoCacheLevel"=dword:00000010
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\PropertySheetHandlers\CryptoSignMenu]
"SuppressionPolicy"=dword:00100000
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\PropertySheetHandlers\{3EA48300-8CF6-101B-84FB-666CCB9BCD32}]
"SuppressionPolicy"=dword:00100000
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\PropertySheetHandlers\{883373C3-BF89-11D1-BE35-080036B11A03}]
"SuppressionPolicy"=dword:00100000
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\SCAPI]
"Flags"=dword:00100c02
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager]
"SafeDllSearchMode"=dword:00000001
"SafeProcessSearchMode"=dword:00000001

It would be a good idea to test and then implement these entries in your Terminal Server builds or GPOs. Read the entire blog entry on tuning Windows Explorer's SMB usage here.

shawnbass.com - Server Based Computing blog

Optimizing SMB settings for your Terminal Servers