Mailing List Archive

[Bug 946] scp slow file transfers, even with -1 -c blowfish
http://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=946

Summary: scp slow file transfers, even with -1 -c blowfish
Product: Portable OpenSSH
Version: 3.8.1p1
Platform: ix86
OS/Version: Cygwin on NT/2k
Status: NEW
Severity: major
Priority: P2
Component: scp
AssignedTo: openssh-bugs@mindrot.org
ReportedBy: zippy@cs.brandeis.edu


I am using scp and seeing file transfers that are far, far below my wire speed.
Using the scp default settings, I get ~300kB/s on a 100Mb/s networks and a
10Mb/s network. Using ssh version 1 and blowfish I get 500kB/s-1MB/s, again on
both the networks.

I am running scp on Cygwin on a 1GHz Centrino x86 machine (Windows XP Pro SP2).
The process monitor reports the CPU on the sending machine is around 50%. In
transfering a 200MB movie (avi) I see the following stats:

$ scp 200MB-movie.avi foo@bar:/a/b
200MB-movie.avi 2% 4848KB 480.8KB/s 06:00

I see this with any destination machine on two different LANs: a Suse64 AMD64
with no load and a RAID5 array, a P133 FreeBSD box with no load and a single IDE
drive, and a Linux box with moderate load.

If I force scp to use ssh protocol version 1 and blowfish, I get better
performance but still far below wire speed:

$ scp -1 -c blowfish 200MB-movie.avi foo@bar:/a/b
200MB-movie.avi 7% 14MB 813.9KB/s 03:21 ETA

I ran top on one of the destination machines (Suse64 AMD64) and the CPU was
under 10%.

I do not have a .ssh config file.

$ ssh -v
OpenSSH_3.8.1p1, OpenSSL 0.9.7d 17 Mar 2004

Any suggestions or workarounds appreciated.

--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu



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[Bug 946] scp slow file transfers, even with -1 -c blowfish [ In reply to ]
http://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=946





------- Additional Comments From dtucker@zip.com.au 2004-11-02 21:23 -------
Try Ciphers=arcfour it's usually faster than blowfish or aes if you're CPU
bound. Also, make sure you have compression disabled.

With my laptop (XP SP1, 1.3 GHz Pentium M, OpenSSH 3.9p1) on a 100Mb/s ethernet
I get 1.5 MB/s (aes128-cbc, 15% CPU) and 1.6 MB/s (arcfour, 10% CPU). In my
case, it appears to be IO bound.

How fast can you push data across your network without SSH?



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