Blazing fast SMB share with long ping

Hello! I travel frequently, and sometimes my NAS ends up thousands of kilometers away from me. I’ve encountered a significant issue: even with fast internet (gigabit speeds at both ends), the SMB share performs unbearably slowly — directory listing takes several seconds, copying each file (even small ones) takes 10–20 seconds, and Time Machine backups never complete — it’s simply unusable.

I suspect this is due to the SMB protocol being configured to operate synchronously, leading to an excessive number of requests that wait for each other in sequence. With 200–500ms pings, this turns into a nightmare.

I’ve tried various connection methods — WireGuard VPN, ZeroTier, and TailScale — but none of them helped. Even though all these solutions report a DIRECT connection (not through a relay, but directly, since the NAS has a static IP and all ports are open), the speed does not improve.

My question is: is there any way to configure SMB to function properly with such high latencies? Or are there alternative workarounds that can fully utilize the available bandwidth? Thank you!

This has more to do with MacOS client behavior (IMHO excessive amount of SMB requests for basic operations) than the protocol itself. IIRC it generally performs at least an order of magnitude more requests per basic operation than Linux or Windows clients. This can hurt on LAN, and terribly hurt on WAN link… and there’s not much that can be done to fix server-side.

One thing you can do client-side is disable ds-stores for network drives.

NOTE: this requires client reboot.

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Thank you for your answer! Maybe you know more tweaks for MacOS clients, that can speed-up SMB shares over the internet?