SFTP Speed and Feature Request

Client feature requests, product gripes, and other general questions.

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RichH
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Feb 03, 2009 8:51 pm

SFTP Speed and Feature Request

Post by RichH »

SFTP has had a lot of speed/performance issues, and so far I have found only 1 client that resolves them: Bitvise Tunnelier. Here are the results of some tests I did recently uploading a 1.7 gig ISO file over a fairly fast broadband connection to CoreFTP server build 313:

CoreFTP LE 2.1 b1625: ~89 KB/s, about 5 hours to transfer
Filezilla 3.2.8.1: ~118 KB/s, about 4.25 hours to transfer
WinSCP 1.9 ~114 KB/s, about 4.25 hours to transfer
Bitvise Tunnelier 4.30 ~350 KB/s, about 1.5 hours to transfer
Unsecure FTP to a similar server, ~500 KB/s+, about 1 hour or so to transfer

The only reasonable sftp client here is Tunnelier. Unfortunately, Tunnelier's interface is designed more for ssh remote control etc., and is not conducive to simple sftp use. The free license is only available for up to 5 corp. clients. That leaves a pretty bleak picture for sftp clients.

The question is, why is Tunnelier so fast? Bitvise' answer:
"To improve file transfer performance in SFTP, the SFTP client needs to implement SFTP read/write packets pipelining. Tunnelier does support that (it even supports readDir packets pipelining), and as far as we are aware, Tunnelier is one of the fastest SFTP clients."

So the next question is, would it be possible to implement this "pipelining" in CoreFTP? CoreFTP has a better interface & licensing model -- all it needs is speed!
RichH
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Feb 03, 2009 8:51 pm

Post by RichH »

Tested again using CoreFTP Lite build 1631. After finding the Pipelining option in the Sitemanager/Advanced/SSH area and turning it on, I am now getting ~300KB/s to transfer the same file as above. Very nice! Just curious -- why is this option not default? And what is the "Pipeline Level" option that is greyed out?

Thanks!
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