FTP - Sooooooo slowwwww on OSX/OS9

bebox

Registered
Hi,
I work on both W2K (ugh) and OSX/OS9 and am having big problems with ftp clients on the Mac side. I use WSFTP on windoze and find that it can connect no problems to out web server and directories come up in about a second or two. But when I connect to the same place via any of about five clients on OSX or OS9 it can take up to 3-4 minutes to show some of the larger directories. Obviously this is not useful as I cannot possibly get much done waiting for the directories to load.

Can anyone help me here....it is very weird!

Thansk alot
Jason
 
first question is what kind of connection? I.e. is the Windows client on an ethernet connection going over a T-1 and the Mac using Airport over some other connection?

Does this happen to every site, or just a few?

What FTP client on the mac? I know fetch is pretty good. I didn't like Anarchy because it always tried to use the mac ftp extensions before the standard ones, slowing down my GET times.
 
Hi,
No ;))...they are both on exactly the same connection - 512k ADSL thru Linux Router

I have tried Fetch, Transmit, Iftp, Anarchie and more. I used WSFTP on the windoze machines at work and it is almost instant in bringing back directoires etc...meanwhile I have had waits of up to 3-4 minutes on the same directoires thru the above programs.

The windoze box is P3 256mb ram etc and the Mac is my Titanium P4 400 with 512 mb ram etc.....all things should really be equal.

The speed is reasonable thru the OSX terminal ftp so it seems there may be something with the graphical clients.

IT makes updating websites very very tedious.....

Maybe 10.1 will fix....

Thanks
Jason
 
I experience a similar problem (& not being able to connect at all) and got this reply from my hosting service:

"We have investigated your difficulties connecting to your Web site via FTP
from your Apple based system. We have found numerous postings on this topic on the Web and in newsgroups, and have confirmed this to be a problem. This is a design change in Service Pack 6a to the Windows NT Operating System.

We have reported this problem to Microsoft, and spoken to their engineers.
A case has been opened with the following number:
SRX991228602825
and the problem seems to stem from the tcpip.sys file updated with SP 6a.

Though it is our interpretation that there will likely be little action taken on this problem in the near future, Microsoft has promised to keep us updated. This move, whether intentional or simply an honest error, further isolates Apple users and possibly others using non NT and Windows operating systems.

Microsoft currently offers no solution to this problem. While a patch to the software may never come, fortunately Burlee has developed several solutions:

1) We will move your site to one of our UNIX (RedHat Linux) machines
free of charge. This problem will disappear for you at this point, but you
should recognize that this is a different operating system, to which there
are some important ramifications (such as the loss of ASP support -
Microsoft does not support ASP on the UNIX/Linux platform). If you would
like to switch to UNIX, please find additional information and the order
form pasted below.

2) Obtain a PC under the Windows operating system, in which case you
would not have the problem.

3) Switch to the FrontPage design tool. As it uses HTTP to upload instead of FTP, you should not experience difficulties. If you are currently using FrontPage on your MAC and you are experiencing these difficulties, please contact us with the specific details of how you are using the program to publish.

4) Accept that you can no longer have interactive FTP access to your site, and wait to see if a fix arrives from Microsoft. The reports we have received from MAC users is that the performance of FTP clients is spotty, meaning that while sometimes simple commands, such as ls, are not executed, there are also instances in which the client will be successful. If you go to the following site, you may also choose other MAC FTP clients, such as "transmit," which might work better. http://www.tucows.com/

Obviously, #2 and #4 are not positive solutions for everyone, and we would strongly recommend #1. If a Windows based PC is readily available, we would recommend using that if it makes no difference to you. If it does, we will gladly move you to a UNIX/Linux machine free of charge (see below). While this is no fault of Burlee, we do regret the inconvenience to you, and are disappointed in the performance of Microsoft on this issue. Any host running NT with Service pack 6 will present the same difficulties to Mac users. We have proposed the best solutions available to us at this time, and hope that one of these, while not ideal, will work for you.
 
Hi Mate,
Thanks for the reply but my ISP is alreay Unix based and that's what I am having problems with so unfortuneatley that won't solve the problem :))

I would love to know the problem as it seems to be directly Mac based and only affects FTP as everything else on the Mac is of course far superior to Windoze...


Thanks anyway!
Cya
Jason
 
are these gui clients you use in OSX and OS9 classic only, or are you using Classic versions in OS9 and OSX versions under OSX? I ask because if you're using the OS9 version of, say, Fetch under both 9 and OSX, then in reality you're only using it under 9 in both cases.

Trying to narrow down your varibles . . .
 
Hi mate,
no everything is fully carbon under OSX and all clients are running under optimum circumstances.
I am now having to run WSFTP on windoze and run 2 windows and transfer the files to windows folder then ftp from that folder up to the website...this works 100 times faster.
Transmit (FTP client) actually took 7 minutes to load a directory this morning!!!...unbelieveable!

I want to use OSX but this is driving me nuts...

Thanks for your help

Jason
 
Have you tried /usr/bin/ftp? It may not be fancy, but there's a lot fewer layers of software between you and the network than with the gui clients. Fewer things that could possibly messed up. :)
 
I don't know if you've considered this, but anyway, there is a setting in Fetch preferences that lets you specify a buffer size for transfers.

Setting this number to a larger buffer size (like 128K) significantly speeds up FTP transfers. Well, at least that's the way it was for me. I don't know about other clients though.
 
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