FTP Server Seems To Be Capped :(

Minimoke · 15 Oct 2009 at 19:45

Hey all,
I recently installed a fresh copy of XP Home on one of my old computers, as I needed an FTP server and the computer was just sitting in a cupboard doing nothing. So, I put FileZilla on it, opened the right ports and gave it a dynamic DNS. Everything went well, and I can connect everytime wherever I am. The problem is, the speed of the server seems to be capped, and it is quite slow to navigate through the directories on the server. The hardware isn't the problem, and the speed of the server never goes above 29KB/s. It's on a BT high end connection with 6MB/s down and 500KB/s up, and those speeds are very consistant. It's on port 21, so could BT be capping that port? I thought I'd ask here before changing it in case there were other things I could try.

Thanks in advance,
Chris.

Rroff · 15 Oct 2009 at 19:51

BT are horrendous for traffic management and shaping - even on normal connections that haven't exceeded the "fair use" allowance so you never know.

Minimoke · 15 Oct 2009 at 19:58

Hey Rroff,
It was a BT Business connection, but it was recently changed to a high end home one. The speeds were the same on both connections. Would it be worth changing ports and seeing if it makes a difference? I have heard of ISP's capping port 21.

Chris.

Rroff · 15 Oct 2009 at 20:01

Its worth changing ports just incase... but BT's traffic management now uses packet inspection to throttle by protocol rather than port throttling.

Minimoke · 15 Oct 2009 at 20:10

I'll remote into it and change it all around. Thanks for the advice mate, nice to know how sneaky British Telecom are!

Chris.

P.S. Nice rig specs

Minimoke · 15 Oct 2009 at 20:12

Just a quick bit!

I just downloaded a file from my browser (ftp://blah blah) and it downloaded at about 10KB/s faster than in a client. Hmmm....

Minimoke · 15 Oct 2009 at 20:12

Isn't that consistant though, the client was getting a solid 29.

Rroff · 15 Oct 2009 at 20:45

Try doing it either in early/mid morning or if possible late at night i.e. after 2am as BT seem to remove most of the throttling during the am.

pennywise · 16 Oct 2009 at 00:26

Rroff said:
Its worth changing ports just incase... but BT's traffic management now uses packet inspection to throttle by protocol rather than port throttling.

I wouldn't think a line on a business profile would have FTP access throttled...

Rroff · 16 Oct 2009 at 00:44

I wouldn't have thought so either... but BT throttle business lines just as much as residential ones.

pennywise · 16 Oct 2009 at 14:14

Rroff said:
I wouldn't have thought so either... but BT throttle business lines just as much as residential ones.

Any references? I'm genuinely interested.

ThomP · 16 Oct 2009 at 14:17

Hi,

What about switching to FTP TLS / SSL ?

Minimoke · 17 Oct 2009 at 10:17

Hey all,
Thanks for all of the replies, they're all very much appreciated. I am in fact changing my server soon. A friend is giving me a good computer with Windows 2000 Advanced Server on it, which should be plenty of functionalilty for me.

As for the connection, I changed the port to a different number (64 if you're interested

) and I'll see what it's like when I'm off site (I'm on the same network as the server at the moment, so I'm getting 2MB/s transfers, which would be hard on 500KB/s upload :S

I'll post here when I've tried it outside of this network.

Chris.

ubern00b · 17 Oct 2009 at 17:05

Have you tried accessing the FTP over LAN to rule out anything other than the internet connection?

pennywise · 17 Oct 2009 at 17:30

ubern00b said:
Have you tried accessing the FTP over LAN to rule out anything other than the internet connection?

Minimoke said:
As for the connection, I changed the port to a different number (64 if you're interested ) and I'll see what it's like when I'm off site (I'm on the same network as the server at the moment, so I'm getting 2MB/s transfers, which would be hard on 500KB/s upload :S

I'll post here when I've tried it outside of this network.

Chris.

Minimoke · 21 Oct 2009 at 00:38

It is quite fast over LAN actually, I get around 1.2MB/s when downloading things via the FTP address locally. What does this mean for me then?

Cheers,
Chris.