Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Making scp go a little quicker

Transferring files with scp isn't the quickest option, but if it's the only one there's a simple way to make it go a little quicker.

scp -c blowfish source.file remote.host:/destination/file.name


Using blowfish rather than the default 3des gave me about an extra 50% or so of throughput.

This was really noticeable on my new T5120s, where I went from under 10M/s to over 13M/s for a single copy. (OK, so it can probably run lots in parallel, but I was just moving large images.)

2 comments:

Niall said...

I'm pretty sure that 3des is only the default cipher for protocol 1, and an aes cbc is the default cipher for protocol 2.

Anonymous said...

I've found arcfour to be even faster than blowfish on the Niagara class CPUs...worth a try.