Slow transfer speed

[bpbp-boop]

Hello, I was testing out unFTP for use in a speed testing scenario

I found with unFTP speeds are limited to under 10MB/s while using vs-ftpd I can get up to about 50MB/s. Both using PASV mode. let me know if I can add more information.

[hannesdejager]

Hi @bpbp-boop

Could you tell us more about how you run unFTP?

1. Firstly, did you run the debug or release builds ? The debug build are known to be slow.
2. Could you give us the command line arguments you ran it with or tell us what storage back-end you used (e.g. File/GCS) and whether or not you had FTPS enabled.

[bpbp-boop]

I am using the MUSL binary from the release page and the command line arguments are

./unftp_x86_64-unknown-linux-musl --root-dir /srv --bind-address 0.0.0.0:29 --bind-address-http=0.0.0.0:7555

not using FTPS and filesystem is a xfs in a VM on block storage on a large HP SAN (albeit only with 15k drives not SSDs :) )

vs-ftpd test was run on the same server too.

[hannesdejager]

Hmm, OK, not the typical developer test bench case. :-)

I assume the 10MB/s was on a big file or was it lots of small files perhaps?

[bpbp-boop]

Yes, one file 100MB in size

[hannesdejager]

Hi @bpbp-boop

This perhaps fixes the slow transfer on GET: bolcom/libunftp#243

This is in the library used by unFTP, so I'll update unFTP soon.

I'll check PUT also.

[bpbp-boop]

Thank you! :) I will test next week

[hannesdejager]

I've made improvements to STOR too: bolcom/libunftp#247

Also in the library.

I'll try to make a new unFTP release soon.

[bpbp-boop]

OK as promised it's 2x as fast, limited to about 20MB/s now (up from 10MB)

[hannesdejager]

OK, thanks for the feedback. Not that great an improvement then. Strange...

[hannesdejager]

Upon further investigation it seems that vsftpd gets its speed from utilising kernel space copying namely sendfile. It would be interesting to see how vsftpd and unFTP compare when FTPS / TLS is switched on on the FTP data channel

[hannesdejager]

We logged this ticket in libunFTP for this: bolcom/libunftp#340

[hannesdejager]

Closing in favour of the ticket logged in libunftp