More statistics

A followup to yesterday's post. I tried a number of things to find out what's going on.

osx$ ping -D -f -s 1472 windows
This gets me 2.5MB/sec, over 20% utilization. That's an improvement over yesterday's lame numbers, but still a bit low.

osx$ nc -l -u -p 2222 | tar xvf -
windows$ tar cvf - . | nc -u osx 2222
This gives a tolerable 1.8MB/sec at the receiver, but who knows how much data was dropped on the floor.

Copying all my files to a firewire drive and then reading them off again works out at 8-9MB/sec.

Conclusion: use firewire. Do not attempt to be clever with netcat or ssh.



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Make the switch now! It's slow!

Oddity of the day:

Imagine that I wish to move several gigabytes of (already compressed) data from a Windows machine to a Powerbook. I connect their builtin ethernets, both 100Mbps.

On the OSX machine I do:
machine1$ nc -l -p 2220 | tar xvf -
and on the Windows machine I do:
machine2$ tar cvf - . | nc machine1 2220
then it gets about 0.5% utilization (50KBytes/sec).

When I use the SFTP GUI from ssh.com on Windows, and the built-in sshd on OSX, it's not much better: 180KBytes/sec, or 1.5% utilization.

Apparently it's faster for me to use an external hard drive to move files around (and connecting both machines by firewire doesn't appear to be an option, and no I don't have one of those USB copy-your-files devices).

Anyone know why:
1. Netcat is slower than SSH
2. The two IP stacks are so slow talking to each other?

(No, I won't give you an ethereal trace)




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