I’ll be the first to admit that I’m an SCP addict. It doesn’t matter what kind of data I’m working with, if it can be turned into an object that I move around with scp I’m in! One thing I’ve always noticed with scp is the dismal out of the box performance. I read quite some time back on the openssh mailing list that there were some fixed buffers inside openssh that prevented copy operations from fully utilizing high speed network links.
This past week my fellow bloging partner Mike sent me a link to the high performance ssh project. This nifty project created a patch that replaces the fixed length buffers with values determined at runtime. This is pretty fricking cool, and I hope they get their changes merged into the openssh source code! The site that currently hosts the HPN-SSH code also has a good article on tuning your TCP/IP network stack. Good stuff!