Slow Transfer Speeds from MiSTer to PC

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Ray
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Slow Transfer Speeds from MiSTer to PC

Unread post by Ray »

Hi,

i have a Gigabit LAN connection from mister to my Macbook (green light at LAN port). When i transfer files from mister to my macbook in the shell I get around 8-10MB/s no matter what i use (SCP, RSYNC, SFTP). I am transfering one huge file, located on the mister sdcard.

When using the FileZilla FTP client, I get about 20MB/s. Still very slow, but double the speed compared to command line.

Why is it so slow? And why is FileZille twice as fast as sftp from the command line? What are your transfer speeds?

Cheers
Ray
Bas
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Re: Slow Transfer Speeds from MiSTer to PC

Unread post by Bas »

FTP is unencrypted, permitting higher transfer speeds. The other methods you mention all bottleneck on the MiSTer CPU side because of encryption. It's also highly unlikely that you'll get anywhere near consistent Gbit speeds from the MiSTer at all. There's a huge difference between syncing a LAN port to 1Gbit/s and actually shoveling data at the required rate through the entire system to saturate the link.
Ray
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Re: Slow Transfer Speeds from MiSTer to PC

Unread post by Ray »

@Bas Thx!
Intersting point about the encryption. Didn't think this would have such an big impact.

Just switched to SFTP in Mozilla and speed drops down just like on command line with sftp. So that's actually the Problem, just as you said.

What should be the fastest way to transfer files via network to/from mister? Samba is rather slow as well I think, but I did not try it.

Cheers,
Ray
Bas
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Re: Slow Transfer Speeds from MiSTer to PC

Unread post by Bas »

Samba is about as fast as it gets. I saw people report decent results here. Your mileage may vary and the SD card may well be the limiting factor there.
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Re: Slow Transfer Speeds from MiSTer to PC

Unread post by Solskogen »

I don't think you'll get better than around 20MB/s even with samba. The SD card reader on the DE10-Nano isn't especially fast even with fast SD cards.
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Re: Slow Transfer Speeds from MiSTer to PC

Unread post by Ray »

jup, samba is about the same speed as FTP.... seems like 20MB/s is as good as it gets
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Re: Slow Transfer Speeds from MiSTer to PC

Unread post by Bas »

It won't. Your SD card may simply not be able to push the bits any faster even if the network card can. You could run tests using iperf if that's in the MiSTer OS installation (not sure if it is). That'd test just the raw network throughput without touching the SD.
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Re: Slow Transfer Speeds from MiSTer to PC

Unread post by EvilRyu »

Apologies for bumping an old thread.

I am seeing very slow speeds when copying files to the USB SSD over LAN (no wifi), around 400KB/s. Is this normal? and is there a way to improve transfer speeds to the SSD? Copying to the SD Card is something like 8MB/S which is slow but acceptable. It's not the end of the world as I can just plug it into the computer but it would be very convenient not having to do it all the time.
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tenshin2002
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Re: Slow Transfer Speeds from MiSTer to PC

Unread post by tenshin2002 »

I have the same issue with superslow download speeds and most of the time it times out before an .rbf of a few megabytes can finish the download. The MiSTer is connected through LAN cable and I have a 100/100 MBit internet connection. Any suggestions on how to troubleshoot the network connection on MiSTer? Something is wrong here.
Thanks!
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Re: Slow Transfer Speeds from MiSTer to PC

Unread post by hitm4n »

I know this thread is a little old, but found it via googling for WinSCP transfer speeds to Mister. I wanted to speed things up a bit as 40-400kb isn't good enough when transferring 10gb files :)

So... Just changed my protocol from SFTP (seemed to be capped around 400kb/sec) to FTP in the WinSCP connection manager. Now i'm getting a little over 5mb/sec transfers TO the MiSter. I did try to alter the connection properties under the SFTP options in advanced, turned off encryption, disabled the "optimize buffer size" options but nothing improved the speed. Changed to FTP and boom, averaging 5mb/sec now. Hope this helps a few people out. I wish the speed was quicker, i'm sure the MiSter can be quicker than this, maybe its the transfer direct to microsd thats the issue, i dunno, gonna keep seeing if i can improve it...

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Re: Slow Transfer Speeds from MiSTer to PC

Unread post by Bas »

Yep.. that's encryption for you, and a less than stellar IO path between the network and the SD card. Like I said before: you can have a 1Gbps link on your ethernet phi, it's not going to mean you get anywhere near that speed when there's also a relatively puny system bus and SD card I/O involved. Test with iperf if you want to isolate problems on the network. If that gives you crummy data rates, you likely have a cabling issue.

Maybe you can coax the MiSTer into working with jumbo frames. That'll decrease some of the overhead of the TCP/IP protocol but both sides and your switch(es) must support it for it to help. This won't help one iota if the SD card and/or system bus are the actual bottlenecks, hence the iperf test suggestion.

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