On Thu, 31 Aug 2000, Jason Slagle wrote:
The problem is that SCP is several orders of magnitude slower then FTP. I use scp, rsync (on top of ssh), nfs, and several other methods of moving files around, and ftp blows them all away.
You also need to build a ftp like structure on top of it. ie: I pick the files I want instead of having to know the filenames.
Until this happens, I can see no viable alternative to FTP.
I wouldn't be unhappy to see one, but we can't retire it without a good replacement that performs nearly as well.
IMHO the original ftp protocol is quite dated, and could be improved upon in any number of ways, but it probably won't go away any time soon. There are also a number of secure ftp-like interfaces, including one distributed w/ssh. And for the record, there is no inherent reason scp should be more then a slight bit slower then ftp (overhead - the ssh protocol packetizes data), other then being purely CPU bound when doing encryption. If you're seeing even one order of magnitude in performance loss, its probably because you're using a painfully slow default 3DES. Try changing it to something a little better like Blowfish, or none if you really want. (A)RC4 is the least CPU intensive, being a stream cipher, but its not terribly functional in the ssh protocol. If you really want to do high performance crypto, check out some hardware based addons like PowerCrypt (http://www.powercrypt.com), or ASICs from Hi/fn. -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/humble PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177 (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)