I finally sprung for a gigabit switch for my home network. My OLD Dell Poweredge server, my new desktop and my netbook all have gigabit cards. So now of course I have to play with my new toys and do some testing. OBTW all of the machines are running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

I connected from the desktop to the server using Gnome Commander and ssh. I find that the transfer rate as shown by System Monitor is in the range 22 - 24 MiB/s when transferring large files. The network history trace is reasonably flat with a 2 second update interval.

When I transfer the same files using Nautilus which treats the server as an sftp connection I find that the transfer rate is in the range 17 - 19 MiB/s and in some cases not very consistent (it frequently drops by about half for a couple of seconds and then returns to "normal").

The server is not overtaxed as this is all it is doing - ssh and samba - no other services. CPU and memory utilization are minimal. The drives I am using are a Western Digital Black Caviar on the server and a Velociraptor on the desktop. Before I moved the Caviar to the server it was in the desktop where I measured drive to drive transfer rates of 50 MiB/s so drive performance is not limiting.

So my question is - why is ssh faster than sftp?

TIA,

Ken

SCP and SFTP are two different protocols of which the latter appears to have the greater overhead.

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Thanks unSpawn but I guess I failed to complete my description/question...

When I made the connection from my desktop to the server using Nautilus I selected ssh as the connection type. Nautilus shows sftp for ken on taylor10 as the place. I am not running ftp services on the server (taylor10) only ssh server and samba server. When I made the connection with Gnome Commander I again chose ssh as the service type and GC connects me I know not how - I assume it is by ssh. Perhaps GC is using scp in the background?

The Gnome Commander page says "FTP using GnomeVFS ftp module" and the GnomeVFS page states "GNOME VFS is currently used as one of the foundations of the Nautilus file manager". So while I am ruminating in confusion on this I recall an issue at work some years ago regarding SFTP vs. FTPS. So doing a little searching on the topic to refresh my memory I find that "SFTP is an abbreviation of "SSH File Transfer Protocol" - so I should be using the same protocol with both apps.

So I guess my question becomes - Why is Gnome Commander faster at transferring files than Nautilus?

Ken

Looking round a bit I see GnomeVFS has a SSH/SFTP module too. Speed concerns were voiced in Gnome Bugzilla 155872 which seemed to have been patched back in 2006. All I know.

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Thanks again unSpawn. I am glad they patched it. Otherwise it would me take 47 years to fill up my 5 TB server

In any event I almost always use Gnome Commander. It has a few bugs yet to be worked out but I can live with them. If it was not for a two panel file management tool I think I would have sworn off computers by now. The FIRST program I ever purchased (excluding all the programs which were bundled with my Osborne) was Norton Commander for DOS. I copied File Manager - winfile - from NT4 to XP and when I found it did not work on Vista - well I did not want to use Vista anyhow. I have used Free Commander on Windoze Vista and 7 when I have to.

Ken