[ale] stalled ftp/sftp transfers

[Mike Harrison]

On Wed, 13 May 2009, Ken Cochran wrote:

> What should I investigate wrt ftp & sftp transfers that stall?
> I often get sftp downloads that stall and am now rather
> reliably getting stalls at about 135mb on ftp uploads, both
> PASV & non-PASV and with ncftp and (I'd guess) "traditional"
> (builtin) ftp clients.  Server appears to be running Proftpd.

My formerly wonderful, now limited Comcast connection started
behaving this way a few months ago. Something upstream breaks
any open connection after x minutes. It affects playing a web radio 
station, or ftp.   So far, rsync over ssh and scp or ssh itself
seem to be more resilient, and just "hang" for a while
but then they pick back up. My neighbors are seeing the same.

It seems to break/stall a connection at the port level.
ie: I can open up another session while one is hung up.
And then the first one unfreezes in about a minute.

My only point is: It may not be your end, the server, or the gear.
It may be an ISP along the way trying to limit bandwidth leaching
net radios, bittorrents, uh.. everything.

Dang I miss the days of 2 DS3's and a Gig-E Upstream connection...