Slow Transfer Rates?

[colinm]

I've finally got my plug set up with a 1TB usb drive hanging off of it, and it's time to really start using it.  Using both samba and sftp are giving me transfer rates of about 300 KB/s.  That seems a little slow to me.  I'm transferring something from PowerBook (802.11g) to the plug, but I know that's not the max rate for wireless.  What have you guys been experiencing? 

[birdman]

Looks like you have two things in play here.

• How fast you can read from the disk
• How fast you can transfer over the network

With an external USB-powered USB drive (and a powered-hub) I read from it to the Plug at just under 30MB/s, which is about the same as it delivers to my standard desktop system, so not sluggish there.

Reading a 60MB file from the same filesystem over a Wifi connexion using sftp I get ~1.3MB/s.  This is about the max rate that I've seen my Wifi connexion go.

In both cases I remounted the file systems to flush the buffer caches before testing.  (I could instead have echoed something to /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches to achieve the same, but I'd forgotten about that, and forgotten what to echo as well).

[fragfutter]

here are my results running 2.6.31-rc5.

Test               To          From
-----------------------------------------
Local I/O       809.0 MB/s   809.0 MB/s
Local Disk       31.0 MB/s    32.9 MB/s
Wirespeed        83.0 MB/s    38.3 MB/s
Network Disk     31.0 MB/s    26.7 MB/s
NFS Disk         24.0 MB/s    21.2 MB/s

running sftp will most likely be limited by the encryption layer not the wifi connection.

[colinm]

By the way, I should mention that I'm a total Linux noob.    This is my first linux system and I'm jumping in feet first.  What are some ways of testing connection speeds?

[fragfutter]

i used dd (see link in last post). Not a real world test, but testing for maximum transfer rates. Having lots of small files, or random access will provide a different picture. Other tests could be done using bonnie++