Slow upload speed on localhost FTP (ioFTPD 6.3.2r)

[iMiKED]

Hi all!

I have strange issues with ioFTPD 6.3.2r.

There is ftp server, based on ioftpd on my personal PC. When I'm trying to upload something on this ftp from my PC. (I.e. from one HDD to another via ftp) - the max. speed is not greater than 13Mbps.

I checked out all bw-limitations in ioGUI2 - the up is still <13Mbps. I tried diff. clients - the effect is the same.
http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/2209/ioftpdviaiogui2lw1.png

When I copy this folder from one HDD to another via totalcom - speed is about 40Mbps.

So - whats wrong with ioFTPD. Why it caps my speed?

[tuff]

upgrade for a start

[Yil]

Well, there are lots of reasons copy a file and transferring a file through the FTP will operate at different speeds! The FTP has a lot more work to do!

Copying a file through explorer is done by reading in a huge 1M blocks of raw data from the file, then writing that 1M block of data back to disk. That's it.

Copying a file through an FTP requires reading in the data in smaller blocks (128k for the server, probably smaller for an FTP client), sending it back into the kernel over the TCP connection where it may be fragmented further (loopback can be optimized though), then re-assembling it and reading it all back in via TCP on the other side of the FTP, only to be finally written out. Oh, and if the FTP server is the recipient of the file then it must compute the CRC and run script processing on the file as well... And don't forget the overhead if you did this over SSL!

There is just no way any FTP client/server can ever match the performance of a file copy operation because of the extra kernel context switches and TCP overhead.

[iMiKED]

So, is it normal situation that all users (I mean, whole the world) can't achieve speeds greater than 13 Mbps (or around) on ftp daemons?

[Yil]

Oh, you can definitely get faster and provided you have enough processing power and slow enough disks you can get the same speed even under certain situations. But on a balanced system a file copy will always be faster than a client/server file copy.

[iMiKED]

And how to get faster, as you say) It is the problem for me now)

P.S. btw, I have a bugreport, where to send it?

[Yil]

The latest ioFTPD release thread v6.6.x - a sticky thread usually at the top of this forum.

Well, first off I'm curious why you would need to transfer so much data via localhost. Seems like that shouldn't be necessary. Second, make sure encryption is off. Up the packetsize in your FTP client to the max of 64k chunks just in case that isn't optimized automatically for the loopback interface. That's about all you can do really, but transferring so much data on the same machine via FTP just doesn't strike me as necessary.