Re: FTP performance (was Re: Performance)

[Manuel Clos <llanero eresmas net>]

Alexander Larsson wrote:
> We don't do mimetype sniffing on ftp, or remote directories in general.
> I know that the ftp support sucks, but i don't think thats due to
> general nautilus issues really, just that nobody is working on the ftp
> gnome-vfs backend.

I have worked on it a bit. With nautilus I saw that operations get 
cancelled a lot of times and this means login again and again, which 
makes it slow and produce more traffic than needed. I told Christophe I 
will look at it, it is just that I'm low on time at the moment.

> This might be better in 2.4.1, which doesn't render anything before all
> the directory has been read.

Does the window appears if I do: "nautilus ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub"; ? I 
have seen nautilus waiting to show the window until the cdrom spins up. 
In my opinion the window should be presented to the user as soon as it 
constructed and don't wait for devices / directory listings.

> > The second is : why all this net traffic before beginning a ftp download ?
> No idea. Do you want to work on the gnome-vfs ftp backend to figure out
> why and fix it? We need people to work on it.

Basically gnome-vfs ftp module tries to get a valid connection from the 
pool. It tries a CWD to see if it is valid, then nautilus tries listing 
the dir and for some reason (more debug needed here) the call is 
cancelled, so all the trafic is wasted and it tries again, this time a 
new connection (login, cwd, listing) is made. This is not a lot of 
traffic but it is really slow.

I'll look at the cancellation problem since it seems the cause of the 
slow ftp problem in nautilus.

See you.

--
Manuel Clos
llanero eresmas net
http://llanero.eresmas.net