fast internet file copy (?)

Barry Shein root at bu-cs.UUCP
Sun Sep 22 10:12:11 AEST 1985


>From: dove at mit-bug.UUCP (Web Dove)
>
>We have two vax/750's running 4.2bsd on the same internet wire.  Both
>have interlan NI1010 network interfaces.  What is the fastest way of
>getting a 250,000 byte file from one to the other with this medium?
>
>FTP rarely does better than 20kbytes/sec.  Is there a way (perhaps
>using raw sockets or some other special xfer protocol) to get close to
>the megabit per second speed of the wire?

YES, and this is worth noting:

IF your two systems are the same hardware, software (even if they're not
you can try this) try setting FTP to 'type binary' (binary transfer.)
Default on 4.2 is 'text', which means things like newlines are getting
translated to CR-LF and back which means character processing which means
slowing you down. 20KB/s is a typical upper limit (well, average upper limit)
for 'text' transfers between two vaxen over an ethernet. You will see
dramatic speed-ups if you try binary. Try it once and verify that what
gets to other side is what you want (if it is any unix-unix it probably
is, but you need to check this.)

Also (I bet you get this answer a lot) rcp should be similar in speed to
ftp binary.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University



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