I'm on a cable modem at home with 1.5M down and 128K up. When I go to broadband test sites (clearing my internet cache first of course), I get around the nubmers I'd expect. My down hovers around 1.1-1.2M down and 115-120K up. But when I FTP stuff, I get rates of around 50K down and 15K up. I've tried different FTP programs, and different FTP sites, the same file multiple times and even different files. I have a Mac in my household and a PC; both get the same rates. Is FTP just slow? Is there anything I can do, besides pay for more bandwidth from my cable modem provider, to make FTP'ing faster. My Mac buddy relies on uploading pretty heavily since she's a work-at-home graphics designer.
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is ftp slower than other protocols?
- Thread starter crabby117
- Start date
It might be tat the FTP sites your going to are either a) under heavy load or b) using aggressive bandwidth throttling. I use FTP pretty often on my home LAN between several of my machines and don't se things moving any slower than sharing folders or using HTTP...my network monitoring seems to spike to the same numbers dependant on which interfaces I'm using (wired 10/10, wired 10, wireless 11).
-T
[sub]01000111 01101111 01110100 00100000 01000011 01101111 01100110 01100110 01100101 01100101 00111111[/sub]
The never-completed website:
-T
[sub]01000111 01101111 01110100 00100000 01000011 01101111 01100110 01100110 01100101 01100101 00111111[/sub]
The never-completed website:
- Thread starter
- #3
Are you using FTP between the PC's on your home network? Or are you going outside of your network? When I FTP between PC's inside my router, it's blazing fast. It's just when I go outside my home it's slow. I thought it might have been site-related, that's why I've tried several sites. They can't ALL suck. Perhaps it is my ISP, which is Cox Communications? I've tried doing tracert's to the FTP sites I go to and they don't seem very fast either, though I'm not sure what numbers constitute "fast" when using tracert. (Shall I post my results?) There seems to be bottlenecks hoping from Cox site to Cox site.
Don't forget that FTP generally refers to KiloBytes, whilst download speeds are generally Kilobits.
8 bits per byte, hence: 50KBps = 400Kbps
(50 KiloBytes per second = 400 Kilobits per second).
OK, this is about 40% efficiency for a 1Meg pipe, so it's a little under par - the best reference point is an FTP server belonging to the ISP supplying your connection. This usually eliminates most sources of latency, giving a truer indication of your speed.
<marc> i wonder what will happen if i press this...[ul][li]please tell us if our suggestion has helped[/li][li]need some help? faq581-3339[/li][/ul]
8 bits per byte, hence: 50KBps = 400Kbps
(50 KiloBytes per second = 400 Kilobits per second).
OK, this is about 40% efficiency for a 1Meg pipe, so it's a little under par - the best reference point is an FTP server belonging to the ISP supplying your connection. This usually eliminates most sources of latency, giving a truer indication of your speed.
<marc> i wonder what will happen if i press this...[ul][li]please tell us if our suggestion has helped[/li][li]need some help? faq581-3339[/li][/ul]
- Thread starter
- #5
Well I confirmed with my FTP program that the transfer speeds I'm seeing are KB not Kb. Moreover, we upped our ISP package to get double download/upload speeds, so we now get 3MB down and 256KB up. Having done that, our FTP transfer speeds did indeed double and now we top out at about 30 KB/sec. Does this pattern point to anything?
robbieguy2003
ISP
How big are the files your uploading?
Even on a 100Mb/s connection to my companies webserver it can still be slow going up for lots of small files.
This is because the ftp program uploads a file, stops, gets the next file, uploads it, stops & so on.
This process means with smaller files (less than 1MB) your not going to get upto the speed your connection is capable of because when it gets upto speed the file transfer stops, gets the next file on the job and starts again.
HTH
Rob
Servers live with the rule - What goes up must come down
Even on a 100Mb/s connection to my companies webserver it can still be slow going up for lots of small files.
This is because the ftp program uploads a file, stops, gets the next file, uploads it, stops & so on.
This process means with smaller files (less than 1MB) your not going to get upto the speed your connection is capable of because when it gets upto speed the file transfer stops, gets the next file on the job and starts again.
HTH
Rob
Servers live with the rule - What goes up must come down
- Thread starter
- #7
We're uploading files, anywhere from 1.5 MB to 7 MB or more. I've also been able to confirm that it's not the web site(s) we're going to because I had a friend who has the same ISP test his and he gets around 100 MBps upload speed, sustained. I gave him the same files and asked him to tap into the same sites. He's on the 1.5/128 package speed and we're on the 3.0/256 package speed.
Oh, and one more thing, I've eliminated my router from the picture and hooked up a PC directly to the cable modem. No change. I think our service just sucks!
I appreciate everyone's input, though. Cheers!
Oh, and one more thing, I've eliminated my router from the picture and hooked up a PC directly to the cable modem. No change. I think our service just sucks!
I appreciate everyone's input, though. Cheers!
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