Slow FTP transfers

Help & Support
1

I was just complaining to my web host how slow FTP uploads were when they suggested trying Filezilla. Sure enough Filezilla is more than 2 times fast than Directory Opus at uploading files via FTP (65 KB/s vs 23 KB/s).

Is this a known issue, a fact of life, or is there something I can do about it?

I know a few years ago I experiancing slow file transfers to a USB device because of the buffer size in DO. Is there something I can tweak to get better performance?

2

  1. How are you connecting to the site in both programs? FTP, SFTP, FTPS...? Is it the same in both programs?

  2. What sort of transfers are you doing? A few large files or lots of small files?

3
  1. Connecting using just plain FTP in both programs
  2. I'm transfering one large file. For the purpose of testing a single 9MB JPG.

I do get faster transfers with another host - an extra 10 KB/s. But it still doesn't come close to the speed I get with Filezilla.

4

Which server is running the FTP site? You should be able to tell from a message in the FTP log just after connection.

5

Also, is Filezilla still faster if you're only uploading a single file? From the look of it Filezilla will upload several files in parallel which can be faster than doing them in serial (especially when there's a lot of latency).

I also see that FZ supports compression (maybe only when connected to SSL FTP sites? or perhaps only when talking to the FZ server? I haven't looked into it in depth so not sure when it is used) which may be another explanation.

Still not sure what it is that makes FZ faster (and the FZ author mentions he isn't doign anything special when asked why FZ is faster than most other clients here) but if we can work out what FZ does differently maybe the same can be done in Opus.

6

The ftp server is ftp.servage.net. The server is in the US and I'm in Aus. Both DO and FZ are using port 21.

I'm transfering just a single large file to get those transfer speeds.

A mate of mine uses SmartFTP to the same server and gets much the same speed as DO over the same Internet connection.

Just to test, I FTPed a file to a server on our network and went over 800 KB/s. So clearly DO is capable of faster. What are the odds FZ is finding a shorter, faster, route to the FTP server?