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How SMB metadata caching works

When enabled, the SMB metadata cache stores path and file attribute data for a limited amount of time. This can improve SMB performance for SMB 1.0 clients with common workloads.

For certain tasks, SMB creates a significant amount of traffic that can include multiple identical queries for path and file metadata. You can reduce the number of redundant queries and improve performance for SMB 1.0 clients by using SMB metadata caching to fetch information from the cache instead.

Attention
While unlikely, it is possible that the metadata cache might serve stale information to SMB 1.0 clients. If your environment cannot afford this risk, you should not enable this feature.