Slow SFTP transfers compared to alternatives

Help and Support
1

Has anyone else noticed slow sftp transfers? With rclone and 4 transfers i am pulling 35Mb/s with filezilla and 1 transfer i can max my connection at 120Mb/s.
Thoughts?

2

How are you measuring the speed? Remember rclone reports in MByte/s normally.

I can transfer files at 100 MByte/s to a local sftp server with rclone.

I think FIleZilla is very clever though so I wouldn’t be total surprised to hear it was faster, though I am surprised to hear it is 3 * faster

3

I was measuring from windows task manager in megabit. Would be happy to setup a more formal test and post screens if you want.

*EDIT
Here is a few images

[Album] transfer speeds

The white is filezilla
The blue is rclone using powershell

4

Interesting - thank you for posting.

I wonder if this is a Windows specific problem? I admit I haven’t tested sftp on Windows at all! I can do 100 MiB/s with rclone to a local sftp server

Which version are you trying? Can you try the latest beta http://beta.rclone.org/v1.35-104-g33c287 which has had changes in the buffering…

Interesting discussion here on sftp speeds. Is the server you are trying to transfer to close or far (what is its ping time)?

5

i was on like 1.35 99 or something. i can test again. i can probably also test on a linux build just to see if its windows specific.

1 Like
6

ok i did a virtualbox ubuntu with the 1.35 109 I still only had about 10Mb/s. The ping to the box isn’t great at about 150ms but like i said filezilla maxes my connection at 120Mb/s even at 1 file.

7

I’ve confirmed this using netelem to make abritrary networking delays: https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/networking/netem

At 1ms delay I get 100 MB/s

At 10ms delay I get 73 MB/s

At 100ms delay I get 9 MB/s

Can you make an issue for me on github please?

Thanks

8

Interesting.
Thanks for looking making an issue now :slight_smile:

Thank you.

https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/1158

1 Like
9

I have the same issue too. Thanks for posting!

10

@ncw I have verified with my own eyes that filezilla opens multiple ssh streams as opposed to multiple transfers over one ssh connection. I know that was a concern of yours. Would be great if we could maybe have an option for either route. The speed difference is crazy!

11

Can you make an issue about this please? I’m going to be working on SFTP for 1.38 so then would be a good time to do this.

12

@ncw done