Re: Speeding up SCP for high speed LAN use?

[Victor <victord_(_at_)_paid_(_dot_)_com>]

John D. wrote:
> Is there a way to turn off the encryption in scp? Why you ask?
> I use scp to move files around my local area network, and the encryption
> seems to be limiting me to 32Mbps. I want the convenience of scp (I don't
> want to have to run ftp servers on each of these), I just want it faster.
> Security isn't a problem here, as it's just between me and my machines.
> Ideally, there should be a "-c none" command line option I would
> think.
>
> "Link is up 1 thousand million bits per second full duplex"
>
> John

If I recall correctly, it's public key cryptography that's very 
expensive. Blowfish and AES and Twofish (etc..) aren't that expensive, 
nothing that a modern cpu can't handle. If you are transferring that 
much data, you might actually be IO bound rather than your cpu 
strangling to encrypt. Surely it will be slower than no encryption, but 
not that much slower... I just tried it and got a 28 meg file 
transmitted in 4 seconds on a 100Mbps network with the blowfish cipher. 
That's roughly 54Mbps. And that's with a transmitter box being somewhat 
loaded.