Microsoft fixes Windows 'idiosyncrasy' that hampered some SMB file transfers

Microsoft this month fixed what one of its staffers called an "idiosyncrasy" in the end-to-end SMB compression functionality it began rolling out last year for Windows Server 2022 and Windows 11. The upshot is: you may find your network file transfers run at least a little faster than before. Starting in June 2021, the …

[Neil Barnes]

"Now we just assume if you try to compress, you want to compress."

Well, duh... user knows best? Whatever next?

[Fred Daggy]

Re: "Now we just assume if you try to compress, you want to compress."

The user is boss.

But I have seen with dd and tar and gzip that compression does not always lead to faster transfer times. Might have been a move to prevent the user shooring themselves in the foot. But, I agree that the user should be allowed to do this.

[Sam Liddicott]

Re: "Now we just assume if you try to compress, you want to compress."

pigz, thr multithreaded gzip zipper may help

[Anonymous Coward]

Did the unit tests pass?

>Did the unit tests pass?

>Yes - green light says go, unit test transfer completed successfully

>OK. Build it zip it ship it

And no-one checked if it was actually being compressed...

[Dan 55]

Solution is blatantly obvious

You should be able to create an exception list in a simple UI based on the filetype. Images, videos, and compressed samples don't get compressed, the rest do if you ask for it.

[Wibble]

SMB's sooo sloooow...

SMB's a shockingly lousy protocol, well, certainly as implemented by Microsoft on their operating systems. Even copying to an SMB share from a Mac it's so damn slow. Yes, it's a feature.

[Anonymous Coward]

DLP?

Interesting. Wonder how content inspection services (firewalls, etc.) are going to deal with compressed files over SMB?

[Ken Hagan]

Re: DLP?

Same as they do currently when someone uses tar (with compression) to stream a directory tree to another machine.

[Sam Liddicott]

Re: DLP?

It's likely encrypted anyway, is it's a Microsoft server

[The Man Who Fell To Earth]

It's Microsoft

Anyone check if the compression is lossless?

[Richard 12]

Re: It's Microsoft

2GB is a hard limit for compress.exe, because someone used sample code rather than reading the actual spec.

The first place I hit that was compressing PDBs - partly because Chromium is huge, but not only.