folks: I just installed RH9.0 and started vsftp. I purposly put a 420 mb movie file on the box and asked my friend to download it through vsftp to test the performance. However, he could only get about 17kb/s download speed on average and the connection is stopped couple hours later. My questions are: 1. Is the cease of the connection caused by some kind of time out value ? If so, how can I modify it? 2. Is there anyway I can increase the download speed to make it, say, 30kb/s Thanks a lot !

so many, many things affect download speed, it's all but impossible to lay it all at the feet of the server. what type of connection does the server have? what type of connection does the downloader have? what other services do you have running? do you run a gui or command line? and this is just the begining.

========================= Here are the answers: ======================== Q: what type of connection does the server have? A: The server has cable internet connection. Q: what type of connection does the downloader have? A: Same, cable internet connection. Q: what other services do you have running? A: I can't name them all. The RH server is running on a 2.0G CPU 256 MB memory PC I built couple days ago. Q: do you run a gui or command line? A: The client was running ftp in command line. ---------------- My concern is that if there is a way I can configure the ftp server to make download speed faster or maybe it's controlled by ISP. Thanks a lot, again!

your server is uploading, what is your upload speed from your cable provider? most isp's have much slower upload than down, since most people are not hosting a web/ftp server. and the server, is it gui or command line. web/ftp/mail servers run better with all but the bare min services running and in command line. you may even need to customize the kernel and re-complie to speed it as much as possible.

Rick: Thanks very much for your time and consideration ! The advertised speed is 3mb/s for download and 384kb/s for upload. However, I nerver reached that speed. I went to some test sites to test my speed. I usually get one third of the speed advertised. In that sense, the upload speed of the FTP server on my RH box should be much higher that 20kb/s which is my friend got. I start FTP server in command mode by typing in service vsftpd restart. Do GUI mode and command mode really affect FTP speed? web/ftp/mail servers run better with all but the bare min services running and in command line. what are web/ftp/mail servers?

web servers is the box and software that serves up web pages, usually apache on linux or tomcat, see if the httpd service is running, vsftp is the service that servers up ftp, file transfer requests. mail servers is the software that serves mail, usually sendmail on linux. gui sucks up memory and keeps it, causing les to be avaible to handle the ftp requests, or web page requests, etc. hence slowing down the machine and everything it does, including uploading files via ftp. all the services take memory and processing time, which takes memory and processing time away from what you want, to serve up files.