Bad FTPupload performance to Dreambox

[mietde]

Hi, i've got a Dreambox satellite reciever.
Strange thing is that the upload speed with Total Commander's build in FTP client to the Dreambox is very bad.
Where other standalone ftp clients like Ultrafxp, LeechFTP, cute ftp manage to upload around the 4mb a second i get not even 100kbytes with TC.
I think the drivers of the Dreambox is causing this problem but i wonder if there is a tweak possible for TC to get the speeds the other ftp clients are able to achieve.

When i tweak the Dreambox by telling it it has a 10mb nic i can get about the maximum upload speed but that takes down the download speed down for a lot as downloading with TC doesn't seem to have the same issue.(goes a lot faster).

Another tweak that seems to help a bit is:

Code: Select all

ifconfig eth0 mtu 1400
echo 1 > /proc/sys/dev/eth0/swfdup

Thought it might be handy to post the Dreambox nic tweaks

Any clues, suggestions?

[Sheepdog]

Any clues, suggestions?

There is a thread in the german forum .
In short : Christian knows there is a problem with Dreambox FTP but he hasn't yet figured out why. He suggested to try SAMBA instead of FTP, maybe it is faster.

sheepdog

[mietde]

Moving to the german thread...
thx for pointing me to that thread.

[ghisler(Author)]

For mtu 1400, try a multiple of 1400 for the upload block size.

Example:

wcx_ftp.ini, section [General]
UploadBlockSize=8400

In the German forum I recommended 8192, please try both and report your findings here.

[Ged]

I'm glad I found this thread, because this problem has been driving me crazy. I'd tried everything from a clean Windows XP installation to old NIC drivers to a direct connection with a crossover cable, before I thought of trying another FTP client. On my Athlon XP 1900+ with nVidia nForce embedded NIC I got crawlspeeds of +/- 100kB/s with TC and 2000-2200 kB/s with FlashFXP. The strrange thing is, on my old Celeron 450 with a Realtek NIC I get almost the same upload speed in TC as I do with FlashFXP (2000-ish kB/s), with default (none specified) TC UploadBlockSize value.

After trying various UploadBlockSize values, I got roughly the same speed on my Athlon XP. It seems that once you get above a certain value the difference in speed is very small. I ended up with 11936 (1492*8), but there isn't much of a difference from 8192 or 8400. I read somewhere that 1492 was the optimal MTU for the DreamBox (don't know if that's correct though). Perhaps I was just lucky (every time I tried 11936 it seemed slightly faster on average). The upload speed peaks at around 2500, then drops to 1300-1700 before it starts climbing again. When the file is done it's usually averaged 1800-2100 kB/s, which is pretty much as good as it gets with the DreamBox in it's current state I guess.

FlashFXP still seems to average slightly higher (using the default 4096 block size), 2100-2200 kB/s, but at least TC is almost up there now (but not using 4096, with that size it's not quite as fast as with 8000+).

Anyway, I think I'll stick with 11936 unless such a high value will cause problems on some other servers?

[ghisler(Author)]

I wonder what block size is used by FlashFXP. TC uses 512 bytes by default, and it hasn't been a problem for all servers - except for the Dreambox. Using a large block size is problematic when the connection is slow, because the Send function will block until the entire data block has been sent...

[Ged]

In my FlasFXP Beta 2.2.993:
"Options/preferences/advanced/Upload Packet Size" says 4096.
That is what I meant by this:

FlashFXP still seems to average slightly higher (using the default 4096 block size), 2100-2200 kB/s, but at least TC is almost up there now (but not using 4096, with that size it's not quite as fast as with 8000+).

The really weird part is that my old Celeron 450/Realtek8139 uploads at near full speed (~2000kB/s) using the default 512 size in TC.

Anyway, I reverted to 8192 in TC on my Athlon XP since upload performance to my ISP's FTP server was erratic with 11936. 8192 seems to be working well with both my DreamBox and other servers.

[ghisler(Author)]

Thanks for all the details!

[Ged]

Nah. It is me who should say thanks for the best piece of software ever made. Whenever I have to use a TC-free computer and that awful Windows Explorer I feel like both my arms are tied behind my back. But I guess saying that in this forum is preaching to the choir