Ftp Downloads Have Nearly Double Speed Than Http Downloads

[roban]

@mods, please edit the topic title: should be FTP not Fftp...thanks (fixed. Crossy)

Hi,

today I needed to download a large movie file (~500 MB) from my home server in Germany.

My Upload in Germany is 1 Mbit. But my download rate here was always around 400-500 Kbits.

I tried it with Teamviewer file transfer and as a regular download via Xampp Webserver. Same speeds.

Then I tried to download the file via Xampp's Filezilla FTP server.

And...full speed ~1Mbit.

I tested different times of the day, always the same result.

Http ~400-500 Kbit

FTP ~1 Mbit Fullspeed.

Then I tested to http download the file via download manager.

With more connections to the file, I got nearly fullspeed.

But it's not a problem with my machine in Germany, because a friend in Germany was able to download

the file via Http even with full speed.

So what? Is my http download somehow throttled?

What does those Id**ts do (TOT).

This really sucks...(again)

Edited December 29, 2011 by Crossy

[Lannig]

I'm not surprised. FTP is an inherently more efficient protocol for file transfers. FTP servers are optimized for big transfers. HTTP servers aren't.

HTTP usually is proxied, which can slow down things significantly if the proxies are overloaded and your stuff isn't cached yet (it probably isn't). However, this doesn't rule out HTTP being throttled. That's a distinct possibility adding to the picture.

As for Teamviewer, file transfers over it are slow anyway.

As a general rule, use FTP whenever possible if you want speed.

[roban]

Could it be a routing problem?

The routing goes via USA - UK - France - Germany all together 25 hops

But when I connect through my root server's proxy (Frankfurt) the routing is completely different

(Asia network - Japan - Germany), I get *nearly* Full speed ~800 Kbit from my home server, which is much better than through

a direct connection.

Edited December 30, 2011 by roban

[Lannig]

Could it be a routing problem?

The routing goes via USA - UK - France - Germany all together 25 hops

But when I connect through my root server's proxy (Frankfurt) the routing is completely different

(Asia network - Japan - Germany), I get *nearly* Full speed ~800 Kbit from my home server, which is much better than through

a direct connection.

Could be as well. Some ISPs load balance traffic over their different uplink pipes. Part of this might be advertising specific routes for the network where their web proxies reside. I knew we were doing this for sure when I worked at an ISP.

So yes, you could end up going over different routes for proxied and non-proxied connections.

[justsumhelp]

You can check for throttling using this tool http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/glasnost.php

[2008bangkok]

I have never had any good experience with upload or download using FTP very slow