Re: [gftp] Status of development?

[Brian Masney <masneyb@xxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Nov 02, 2005 at 04:09:11PM -0500, Anthony DiSante wrote:
> [gftp] unanswered bug reports and RFEs:
> http://archives.seul.org/gftp/users/Mar-2005/msg00003.html
> 
> My biggest issues are the permissions bug that prevents you from reading 
> files unless you have write-access to them, and the fact that gFTP 
> transfers much slower than other programs (the scp command, etc), over the 
> exact same connection.  (These both have been reported multiple times.)

I believe that scp uses a different protocol than a sftp client. The sftp
protocol itself doesn't lend to fast file transfers (at least as fast as you'd
get with FTP). Basically using sftp you have to request from the server the next
block from the file that you want. The server will then send that block to you.
This is where all of the latency in the protocol comes from. This mimics the
open(), while (read()), close() operation that you would do on the filesystem.
On the other hand, when you do request a file using the FTP protocol, the
server starts sending you the file until one of the following three conditions
is met: i) the entire file is sent, ii) the data connection is closed or
iii) The ABOR command is sent across the control connection.

One thing that I could do to fix this is to find out how scp transfers files to
the remote server and add that functionality to gftp. I will still have to use
the sftp-server service on the remote server so that I can get the directory
listings and do the other non-file transfer operations in a portable manner.

Brian