Recently, the “Ask the Performance Team” blog posted an article detailing some issues with the default configurations of Windows Explorer and SMB (Server Message Block) traffic. As it turns out, there are some registry changes you can implement to optimize the SMB traffic being generated. These registry changes suppress superfluous traffic such as:

• 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

Here are the registry changes:

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

To make things easier, Helge Klein created an ADM template you can use to deploy these changes via GPO.

Continue at source to read about and download this AMD template…

For more information about file serving in Terminal Services environments, be sure to check out these articles on MSTerminalServices.org:

Fileserving in Terminal Server Environments (Part 1)

Fileserving in Terminal Server Environments (Part 2)

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