Windows Networking Vs. SSH
A couple of weeks ago I had to transfer a large amount of data across a network. It was about 30gb and I needed to copy it to 2 different computers. Since the files were on a Windows computer, I figured Windows file sharing would be the easiest way to go. The tricky part though, was the one of the computers getting the data was running Linux.
After trying for awhile to get windows file sharing to work (after shutting down Zonealarm, which took me awhile to remember about) I started the transfer. Windows estimated it would take about 8 hours to transfer the nearly 30gb of data. It actually took closer to 6.5 hours to really transfer the data. That amount to about 1.3 megabytes per second over a 100 megabit network (which is about 12.5 megabytes). Not very good. Thats barely 10% of the full network speed. At this point, I thought there was something really wrong with the network, which I already know there is.
I then tried the transfer a different way. I had setup a Linux computer to use when I needed a second computer for programming if I was using my main computer for something else. I set it up as a web server also, in case our Internet connection was ever going really slow or went down (happened a few times in the past couple of months). Part of that was installing SSH. Anyway, from the Windows machine, I used FileZilla to connect to the Linux box and then pushed the data to it. It took about 1.5 to 2 hours to transfer. Far faster than the Windows networking method. Still not quite up to full network speed, but like I said, the network has issues.
Moral of the story is, transferring files using Window’s builtin file sharing system is extremely slow. Maybe future versions of Windows (maybe even Vista since the machine I am on uses XP) will be better. Until then, I’ll use SSH or even FTP whenever I can. Of course, using a removeable disk might be even faster……