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Re: SCP file transfer speed



Stephan <stephanwib%googlemail.com@localhost> writes:

> When I copy large files through scp to a NetBSD box, I get transfer
> speeds of only 7 MB/s on a 100 MBit connection. This should be around
> 11 MB/s. I´ve seen this on different x86/amd64 hardware with NetBSD 5,
> 6 and 7-BETA. The NICs are largely wm, fxp and bnx.

I tested with the most bloated distfile I had handy -- qt4, at 230 MB.
With compression off, I got 10 MB/s to three different machines
(including a Xen DOM0), 9.0 MB/s to a xen domU, and 6.7 MB/s to another
dom0 that was bought in 2005.  These are all in use with a network with
other traffic, all 100 Mb/s interfaces.   I also saw 5 MB/s to another
machine (many switches away in a different building), but it's a build
server that's usually very heavily loaded.

There are multiple things going on; you're testing packet delivery and
how TCP reacts to it, ssh overhead (CPU time,b expansion), and slowdowns
From writing to the filesystem.  I agree that one would expect to be
limited by the 100 Mb/s Ethernet itself with modern hardware.

You could use ttcp to look at just TCP throughput.

Check cpu usage with top during all this.

Note that ssh is encrypting/macing the plaintext, which results in
larger ciphertext plus ssh headers, plus there are TCP and IP headers,
plus ethernet headers and inter-frame spacing.  So you will not see 100
Mb/s of payload.

gson's results of 16 MB/s is interesting; that's 128 Mb/s of payload,
which definitely seems limited by the Ethernet.   manu@ has reported
speeds that are most (800ish) of GbE with gluster.

I wonder if ssh's internal flow control could be having an effect.

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