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SCP vs. SFTP?

Some things in geek world tend to be a little confusing. Such as the internal differences between SCP and SFTP. Both of then use the SSH protocol to transfer files from one server to another securely encrypted.

Now, sometimes I copy a few things over the “big pond” from Germany to the U.S. and even though the sender is able to upload more than 50k/s (and the receiver can download much more than that), SFTP doesn’t get any faster than 15 kilobytes per second.

When I try the same transfer, a minute later, with SCP, I get roughly 60k/s, which happens to be the upload limit of the sender.

Any clue why this is happening?!



This entry was posted on Thursday, October 5th, 2006 at 4:11 pm and is filed under Tech Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “SCP vs. SFTP?”

  1. 1
    Jean Pierre Says:
    October 5th, 2006 at 11:31 pm

    The bottle neck might be the encryption process but I am not sure about that. Perhaps you could try to change the encryption from from AES to DES.

  2. 2
    Fred Says:
    October 7th, 2006 at 1:51 pm

    Thanks, I will try that. Maybe AES is a little “too complicated” — but I am wondering which different encryption SCP is using then?

  3. 3
    aaa Says:
    October 18th, 2006 at 1:55 pm

    Just did a test on my local LAN with a 4 gig file:
    sftp took 2 minutes, 20 seconds
    scp took 2 minutes, 13 seconds

    AES is supposed to be less processor intensive than 3DES so I don’t think that’s your issue.

  4. 4
    Fred Says:
    October 18th, 2006 at 2:10 pm

    aaa: Thanks for the information. Then there is something else wrong there with my setup.

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