WinSCP mega-slowness

[bsd at bathnetworks.com]

> Well, it's good to know I'm not the only one seing this. Right now both
> machines are running FreeBSD, since I gave up on waiting for Windows to
> copy
> the files.  The CPU load on Window when sending  1 meg per second is
> usually
> about 30%, while the Unix box is only at 1-2%.  When I have 2 Unix boxes
> sending/receiving, I think the load is like 4-5% on both.  I'm building a
> bunch of packages right now, so I can't get the exact number.  I could try
> the openssh patch later in the week, that would be great if there was a
> unix-side fix for this. Of course as I run FreeBSD more, and Windows less,
> the problem will go away, too.
>
> thanks!
>
>
>
> On 2/20/06, Andrew Pantyukhin <infofarmer at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 2/20/06, Xn Nooby <xnooby at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > For about a year I have noticed that whenever my Windows boxes talk to
>> my
>> > Unix boxes, they communicate at about 1/10 normal speed. I copy lots
>> (300GB)
>> > of large files back and forth between machines as I try different
>> OS's,
>> and
>> > I always see this.
>> >
>> > Specifically, if I copy from FreeBSD to FreeBSD, files transfer at 11
>> megs
>> > per second.  Between FreeBSD and Linux, at about 8 megs per
>> second.  Between
>> > FreeBSD and Windows, about 1 megabyte per second.  This is on
>> identical
>> > hardware.  I've told other people about this, and they usually say I
>> must be
>> > doing something wrong, but recently a friend of mine upgraded a
>> Windows
>> box
>> > to SP2, and now they are getting this same slowness.  When I copy from
>> > Windows to WIndows (XP or W2k), I get 11 megs per second.
>> >
>> > My machines are two P4's with gigabit NICs, and I'm using WinSCP and
>> > (somtimes) pscp.exe on WIndows to talk to sshd on FreeBSD.  It's
>> always
>> a
>> > shock when I have to copy my data to WIndows, and it takes 30 hours
>> instead
>> > of 3.
>> >
>> > Does anyone else ever see this slowness when copying files between
>> FreeBSD
>> > and Windows?
>> >
>> > Is Windows maybe capping the transfer speed when it talks to Unix?
>> > _______________________________________________
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>> >
>>
>> It is very certainly a known issue. Not that its specifics and
>> origins are clearly known, but most of us stumble upon it
>> sooner or later. You can usually achieve wire speed only
>> between two OSes of a kind. TCP/IP optimizations are
>> very important here: if they differ, performance plummets.
>> Depends on a multitude of things from quality of NICs to
>> weather in your area. I've never been able to get more
>> than 70Mbit/s between FreeBSD and Windows XP. I
>> always get 90-100Mbit/s between two BSDs or two Win's.
>>
>> As for your case, 1MB/s is a serious limit. What can you
>> tell us about CPU load? Interrupts? Can you try this:
>> http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/hpn-ssh/
>>

If you have both the XP and FreeBSD machines on the same internal network,
why not enable file sharing on the XP box and use Samba Client on the
freeBSD box. I have found SMB to be a lot faster as it is running as a
service on XP.


Rob