[wplug] Mount Remote Drive

[Bryan J. Smith]

Michael Semcheski <mhsemcheski at gmail.com> wrote:
> When I've tested it, SMB does reasonably well in terms of
> efficiency for very large files.  Its not FTP, but its often
> faster than HTTP.

As I'd expect _any_ block transfer mechanism like FTP, NFS, SCP/SFTP,
SMB, etc... to be faster than a character transfer mechanism.  And
yes, SSH has block transfer mechanisms (and you can disable
encryption if you'd like).

"Windows Networking"'s main issues have to do with those support
aspects outside of SMB itself.  Things that "timeout" and keep trying
to establish various IPC, named pipes and other non-sense -- which
Microsoft seems to change with every NT kernel
revision/implementation (let alone the DOS-386Enhanced versions, aka
Windows 9x/Me, are a total joke).

> YMMV.  As for scp or sftp, I've always found them to be reliable,
> flexible, and generally slow.  Again, YMMV.

Using a faster cipher (like Blowfish), or no cipher, addresses that.

> The thing SMB (and scp, for that matter) really choke on are lots
> of files.  It seems like there's a lot of overhead in opening and
> closing files.

Well, there are issues with indexing such in general.

> Also, one thing I've often found, is that if there isn't a
> full-duplex connection between the two ends of the transfer,
> it slows things down greatly.

I'm not understanding your point there.  Usability?  Performance?
SFTP can actually give you quite a bit.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith   Professional, Technical Annoyance
b.j.smith at ieee.org    http://thebs413.blogspot.com
--------------------------------------------------
     Fission Power:  An Inconvenient Solution