Slow Transfer Speeds to PI

[Starkey]

I'm transferring some files (c.350MB each) to a self-powered USB (formatted with NTFS) drive which is attached to my PI. Nothing else is connected via USB, since having some power issues a week or so, all seems stable - the PI has been up constantly for almost 6 days now.

I'm currently getting 20-40 KB/second which is clearly very slow.

I've tried transferring via Windows Explorer and FTP, FTP being the less slow of the two methods.

The Pi is running RASPBMC and was last updated a week ago.
It's connected to a small switch which in turn is connected to a Wireless Access Point which is acting as a bridge and connects to another WAP, which in turn is hardwired to my router.

Ping response times don't seem too bad:
Pinging 192.168.5.10 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 192.168.5.10: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.5.10: bytes=32 time=5ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.5.10: bytes=32 time=6ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.5.10: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=64

The Wireless bridge hasn't dropped as my freeview box has been ok, nothing in the logs on eith AP suggest any issues.

Help, is there anything I can do to speed this up?

I'm a total NOOB with Linux so please try and keep it simple for me!

[EdwinJ85]

What port are you trying to FTP over? port 22 is ftp over SSH and the encryption will make it slower - port 21 will be faster.

[efflandt]

Actually even though ssh connections are encrypted, if ssh compression is enabled, scp or sftp can be faster than a network connection. However, it may be limited by whatever is reading or writing the files and how much the files are already compressed (.zip, .jpg, .gz, etc.). When I scp'd a 1.7 MB file to the Pi from Linux, it appeared to transfer instantly, but it was probably just in RAM buffer in the Pi, because I saw the SD ACT LED come on when I then did sync on the Pi.

This is an example of transferring from the Pi SD to Linux, which was a similar speed earlier transferring this file to a Pi SD. It is via WiFi and the dwc_otg.speed=1 that I have to use for my wireless keyboard/mousepad to avoid dropped/stuck keys may adversely affect speed somewhat (not sure if that switches it to USB 1 instead of 2.0). It is faster than Starkey is seeing, but it is possible that writing many small files has more overhead updating directories and FAT tables than one large file. This was a tarred gzipped file of my home directory, including quake3 build, that I earlier transferred to this fresh SD to extract to my /home:

Code: Select all

efflandt@XPS8100-1204:~/Downloads$ scp rpi:/home-efflandt.tgz .
home-efflandt.tgz                             100%  122MB 835.8KB/s   02:29

[Starkey]

What port are you trying to FTP over? port 22 is ftp over SSH and the encryption will make it slower - port 21 will be faster.

Port 22

Changing the port would make it this slow? really?

[Starkey]

Incidentally, the files are all video's.
Mostly avi's, but also some mkv files.

[joan]

Could you attempt to pin-point the bottleneck?

If you transfer a file to the Pi's SD card is that also slow? Similarly have you tried a direct wired ethernet link etc?

[Starkey]

Will try the transfer to the SD card later on and report back - I'm not near the PI at the moment

As for direct link - that could be tricky due to the location of the pi.

[Starkey]

I haven't changed anything at all, not even a reboot (of anything).

It's now transferring at 924KB/s

Will monitor this one...

[Starkey]

Right, it seemed that the improvement was a one off.

This has been on the backburner for a while, but I could do with a big improvement on performance. It takes longer to transfer a TV program to the PI than it does to watch the show.

In all other aspects the PI works well, although thinking about it the remote control app continuously connects/disconnects - but i have a suspcian that this is the XMBC app at fault?

Unfortunately I can't use a wired connection due to a pesky wall.

I will try transferring direct to the SD later on (with and without the USB HD connected) and report back.

Any other comments/suggestions are more than welcome.

[ghans]

About the XBMC App : The XBMC devs have deprecated the old remote API
recently , only one app (" the name begins with y" , don't know more)
uses the new API.


ghans

[Starkey]

I know the one (the name escapes me too at the moment), will try that one later on. Thanks.

Edit : it's yatse