I use FTP on a daily basis to work on multiple websites, but when I try to work from home, my darned satellite internet has a latency of about 1000ms. (Its craptastic service, I know, but there are no alternatives where I live.) Thus, I was wondering if there is a way that I can connect to my web server and transfer files that can accomodate this latency.
FTP ‘works’, but it communicates very very slowly, and its a nightmare with multiple files. It takes the connection about 10-15 seconds to start the transfer, and another 5 seconds after the transfer is done. The transfer itself goes very fast as expected, but the handshake process does not, as the server/client seem to need to do a lot of communication to negotiate the transfer. Worse, it seems to need to do this handshake thing for every individual file, which certainly doesn’t help.
Is there any way I can modify my FTP to make it work better over a high latency connection? If not, are there any other protocols or transfer services I might be able to use that could handle such an issue? Its the main fault I find with my ISP, and there’s not a lot I’ve been able to find that I can do about it…
Thanks
Sounds like a good case for using UDP rather than TCP-based protocols – e.g. uftp
A quote from the linked site: ‘especially useful for data distribution over a satellite link (with two way communication), where the inherent delay makes any TCP based communication terribly inefficient’.