File transfer over SSH2 Slow

[Techtoucian]

When I try to transfer files using SSH over a 100 Mbit lan, I generally get about a tenth of the speed I would be getting over FTP. I'm transferring some files now and they're snailing along at ~1.3 meg/second.

I was just wondering if there's a way to speed things up a little, or if anyone could give me an explaination as to why this is happening. There's next to no processor usage on either end, and I'm using GFTP.


Thanks.

[Spoon!]

How are you transferring files? Have you tried using "scp -C ..."?

[Jman]

I would check the CPU usage again. Use top or some other process monitor. The connection's encrypted, there's a huge CPU overhead.

[gavinw6662]

I would check the CPU usage again. Use top or some other process monitor. The connection's encrypted, there's a huge CPU overhead.

Transfering data over an encrypted connection will slow the file transfers.

[sej7278]

Transfering data over an encrypted connection will slow the file transfers.

exactly.

i get about a third of the FTP transfer rate over SFTP (even with -C) on 2.4 - 3GHz machines.

[Techtoucian]

I should really have done some testing.

Using scp I got a pretty decent transfer rate of 10MB/s for a 500 meg chunk o' file (About 70% processor usage on my P4 1.6 server). This alongside the fact that the logs don't indicate an sftp connection for scp, leads me to conclude that SCP and SFTP must be different, and SFTP speed limited. The sshd process doesn't even peak at 10 percent for an SFTP transfer.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Edit:
Er, that SCP test was with compression disabled. I just did another test, and even with compression it rockets along anyway.

Edit, Edit:
Okay, SCP is an older protocol than SFTP. I just used the command line SFTP client to transfer the same file and it's going the same speed as it did SCP.

This means one of three things:

Something wrong with both Gftp and Filezilla (Windows app)
Sftp (Command line app) isn't using SFTP, or
I've overlooked something.