Capture One Pro 8 OSX not compatible with Synology NAS drive
I am experiencing a frustrating limitation with the OS X version of C1 and my Synology NAS drive.
I have a catalog stored on a Synology DS112 NAS drive. This catalog was created on a Windows PC with the Windows version of C1. Performance on Windows is fine. The .cocatalogdb file is 91MB in size.
I also have a late 2013 retina MacBook Pro. It's running the latest version of Yosemite. I've checked that it's connecting to the NAS using the latest Samba protocol, SMB3 (this can be found out using the "smbutil statshares -m" command in the terminal). In any case I have the same problem when I use the AFP protocol, and if I force the MacBook to use SMB2 instead. The MacBook connects to my network wirelessly using a brand new TP-Link Archer C8 802.11ac router. The sync rate, which can be seen by holding Alt and clicking the WiFi icon in the top menu bar, is 1053MBps. The Wifi router is connected to the NAS drive using Gigabit Ethernet. With this setup, on regular file transfers using OSX Finder, I get both read and write transfer speeds of between 10-15 MegaBytes/Second, not as fast as gigabit ethernet but pretty fast nevertheless.
However the OS X version of C1P Pro has a problem with establishing a high speed connection to the NAS which, as a result of my testing above, I can only conclude is due to a limitation in the Capture One software itself. When I try to open the .cocatalogdb file by double clicking in Finder, C1 starts to load but all I see is a rectangular grey box with a spinning wheel to the left, C1 freezes up, and this state continues for the best part of half an hour before, eventually, the catalog is opened. In the OS X Activity Monitor I can see that during this time the "kernel_task" process is reading data from the NAS at 500KB/sec read rate, and writing at 100KB/sec write rate. It is very clear from the activity chart in Activity Monitor that this is coming from C1, as the activity immediately ends when C1 is force-quit.
So the bottom line here is that the OS X version of C1P cannot make a high bandwidth connection with my Synology NAS drive, and this makes the software unusable. Its connection speed to the NAS is less than 1/20th of the normal connection seed in Finder. By the process of elimination described above I have concluded that it's very unlikely that this problem is a result of either OS X, the NAS, the Wifi or anything else (bottlenecks caused by any of these would be observable in regular file transfers).
I described this problem to Phase One support a month or two ago, and sent several screen shots, but received effectively a non-answer from them. In the meantime this bug has not been fixed in app updates. It's about time that people considering buying this expensive software are made aware that it has a compatibility issue with Synology NAS drives (and perhaps other brands using Samba as well, but I have no way of confirming this).
Any suggestions on how to address this problem would be very gratefully received.
I have a catalog stored on a Synology DS112 NAS drive. This catalog was created on a Windows PC with the Windows version of C1. Performance on Windows is fine. The .cocatalogdb file is 91MB in size.
I also have a late 2013 retina MacBook Pro. It's running the latest version of Yosemite. I've checked that it's connecting to the NAS using the latest Samba protocol, SMB3 (this can be found out using the "smbutil statshares -m" command in the terminal). In any case I have the same problem when I use the AFP protocol, and if I force the MacBook to use SMB2 instead. The MacBook connects to my network wirelessly using a brand new TP-Link Archer C8 802.11ac router. The sync rate, which can be seen by holding Alt and clicking the WiFi icon in the top menu bar, is 1053MBps. The Wifi router is connected to the NAS drive using Gigabit Ethernet. With this setup, on regular file transfers using OSX Finder, I get both read and write transfer speeds of between 10-15 MegaBytes/Second, not as fast as gigabit ethernet but pretty fast nevertheless.
However the OS X version of C1P Pro has a problem with establishing a high speed connection to the NAS which, as a result of my testing above, I can only conclude is due to a limitation in the Capture One software itself. When I try to open the .cocatalogdb file by double clicking in Finder, C1 starts to load but all I see is a rectangular grey box with a spinning wheel to the left, C1 freezes up, and this state continues for the best part of half an hour before, eventually, the catalog is opened. In the OS X Activity Monitor I can see that during this time the "kernel_task" process is reading data from the NAS at 500KB/sec read rate, and writing at 100KB/sec write rate. It is very clear from the activity chart in Activity Monitor that this is coming from C1, as the activity immediately ends when C1 is force-quit.
So the bottom line here is that the OS X version of C1P cannot make a high bandwidth connection with my Synology NAS drive, and this makes the software unusable. Its connection speed to the NAS is less than 1/20th of the normal connection seed in Finder. By the process of elimination described above I have concluded that it's very unlikely that this problem is a result of either OS X, the NAS, the Wifi or anything else (bottlenecks caused by any of these would be observable in regular file transfers).
I described this problem to Phase One support a month or two ago, and sent several screen shots, but received effectively a non-answer from them. In the meantime this bug has not been fixed in app updates. It's about time that people considering buying this expensive software are made aware that it has a compatibility issue with Synology NAS drives (and perhaps other brands using Samba as well, but I have no way of confirming this).
Any suggestions on how to address this problem would be very gratefully received.
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In my benchmarks with 10.10.x and a QNAP TS-419PII NAS (which is a different and probably much slower beast than your Synology), I get about three times the performance under AFP, particularly on read, than I do via SMB. C1 is also more stable on it, though it can still be pretty iffy at times when loading big catalogs. I keep a copy of Blackmagic's Disk Speed Test and bench this every time I do an OS X update or NAS firmware update--I've found some rather surprising things that way.
Having said all that, try keeping the .cocatalogdb on a non-network drive (a fast USB drive will work fine if you're short on space on your internal) and the images out on your NAS. I run in this configuration and it's way better than keeping the .cocatalogdb on the NAS, which was even more glacially slow.0 -
Also, 10-15MBytes/sec over gigabit ethernet is actually rather slow. 100MBit ethernet tops out at 10MBytes/sec transfer speed, and gigabit tops out at around 100MBytes/sec. Since your Synology is a 1-bay NAS, you should be getting closer to 60-100MBytes/sec read speed over a wired gigabit connection. I'd expect around half that on a wireless connection, but there's a lot that can affect speed over wireless, so your mileage may vary.
Try turning your wireless off, plugging your machine right into your wired hub, and benchmarking that. C1 will still probably be slow accessing that .cosessiondb because it's moving a lot of data around inefficiently, but it should be actually usable.0 -
[quote="NNN635576519722603289" wrote:
Any suggestions on how to address this problem would be very gratefully received.
Based on what you mentioned about performance being fine on a Windows PC the best solution for now might be to use that machine.
Is there any special reason why you need to use the Mac/Synology combination you have described in preference to the PC?
Have you had any correspondence with Synology about what sort of issues need to be considered by developers when reading and writing from Synology drives?
Other than that mkphotomedia's suggestions sound logical.
Grant0 -
Hello,
I have a Synology NAS drive as well.
Well, C1P may not be guilty. Maybe it is doing stuff well but something is bad implemented into the Samba layer of the Mac, or of the NAS.
Why not put your catalog on your local disk ? It will probably works better.
Regards0 -
CO does not support have the session/catalog DBs on a network drive. These should always be located on a fast, local disk.
Having your pictures on a remote server is not a problem.0 -
Reason for wanting to access on the MacBook is the Retina display. And so I can sit around the house on the sofa etc. and browse/tag.
But I don't want to store the DB locally on my MacBook as I travel frequently and there's a risk it gets stolen.
Previous post pretty much kills this dead. But I find it bizarre that no mainstream image editing software officially supports self-contained catalogs stored on NAS/cloud with the ability for the catalog to be accessed from multiple workstations using multiple OSs. Surely this is where things are going to end up in a few years? Look at Google Drive/iCloud etc. And what about collaborating in a group/office environment on a single catalog? Surely the fact that the catalog can only be accessed from one PC is a big constraint?
As a final observation ... if P1 were ever thinking of introducing this functionality in the future, then another thing that needs fixing is the file links to the pictures themselves, which are not interoperable between Windows and Mac. At the moment it appears the file links in the database file are absolute, so when I load the catalog on my MacBook (after the aforementioned 30 minute wait) it looks for the files on the D:\ drive (NAS is set up as mapped network drive on Windows PC) which obviously it cannot find. So I can only work with the preview files in "Offline" mode. One potential way round this would be to use relative links, storing the image file locations as relative paths from the location of the .cocatalogdb file, which would work round the problem of having different drive prefixes on Windows and Mac.
If P1 considers feature requests, then the above is at the top of my list.0 -
UPDATE
After connecting to the NAS using WebDAV, I've discovered that C1 now loads the file within 30 seconds.
That is a massive performance improvement vs. AFP and SMB1/2/3, where it took nearly 30 minutes.
In OS X Finder, the performance of WebDAV for large file transfers is no different from AFP and SMB1/2/3.
But for opening .cocatalogdb database files in Capture One, WebDAV is MUCH faster than AFP and SMB1/2/3.
I struggle to think of an explanation for this.
But it has nearly fixed the problem for me. The only remaining thing to solve is the incompatibility of file referencing between Windows and Mac that I mentioned in my last post.
If anyone could solve the file referencing problem, then I would be sorted.0 -
Other way to work this: keep your .cosessiondb local and sync it with your remote disc so your mobile copy isn't the only copy. Your Synology probably have software to do this; alternately, you could use Dropbox (if your .cosessiondb is small enough), ChronoSync, or BitTorrent Sync. I use ChronoSync for the job and it works great. 0 -
Thanks for the info. [quote="NNN635576519722603289" wrote:
UPDATE
After connecting to the NAS using WebDAV, I've discovered that C1 now loads the file within 30 seconds.
That is a massive performance improvement vs. AFP and SMB1/2/3, where it took nearly 30 minutes.
In OS X Finder, the performance of WebDAV for large file transfers is no different from AFP and SMB1/2/3.
But for opening .cocatalogdb database files in Capture One, WebDAV is MUCH faster than AFP and SMB1/2/3.
I struggle to think of an explanation for this.
But it has nearly fixed the problem for me. The only remaining thing to solve is the incompatibility of file referencing between Windows and Mac that I mentioned in my last post.
If anyone could solve the file referencing problem, then I would be sorted.0
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