Are you using FTP with SmartFTP, or SFTP?
FTP is unencrypted, and will always be much faster than SFTP.
If SmartFTP is using SFTP in your tests:
Firstly, ensure that you are not doing your testing on a server that is running on the same machine as the client (i.e. localhost). Due to the convenience of such a configuration more often that not we find that that is how users are testing performance.
When you test on localhost you are excluding the dominant factor in determining file-transfer performance - i.e. the network. As a result you really end up testing CPU performance, and hence getting results that won't reflect the real-world performance of your application. Though not as extreme, this same principle applies when comparing LAN-based transfers with Internet-based transfers.
Internet transfers will yield transfer speeds down to dozens of kilobytes per second, whereas LAN transfers will generally be in the high hundreds or thousands. In reality, CPU-bound performance makes little difference when transferring across a relatively slow network connection since the vast majority of the time is spent waiting for the network.
Secondly, ensure that you are testing the same ciphers. Ciphers vary greatly in speed. For example, 3DES tends to be much slower than the AES or blowfish algorithms. You can usually see which ciphers are being used by looking at the logs. Most clients, including edtFTPnet/PRO, allow you to control which ciphers are employed.
- Hans (EnterpriseDT)
