Comparing performance: Cyberduck and FileZilla (FTP) and CurlFtpFS (with MacFusion)

[Graham Perrin]

At <http://groups.google.com/group/MacFusion-devel/msg/
0d9a1f334763cd8f>

> everything else seems to work fine, except the fact that transfert speeds are about 5 times lower than those obtained with Cyberduck or FileZilla on the same video file (file about 150 Mo).


= Client does not equal server =

A meaningful comparison of clients should incude full understanding of
associated servers.


= Not all FTP servers are equal =

1. Some FTP servers are deficient, or return unexpected results when
FTP clients request directory listings, and so on.

2. Some FTP servers are fine, but existence within a broader service
infrastructure may mean that what the client perceives to be a
_simple_ operation (copy or upload) actually leads to a _chain_ of
events at the server.

For a trivial copy to such complex servers, the client may notice
nothing unusual.

For more complex or heavyweight copies to such complex servers, the
client may notice something unusual whilst the server works its magic.
An example:

* upload of a collection of video files, to a service environment, may
coincide with server-side on-the-fly conversion (to Flash or whatever)
of each one of the videos.


= MacFusion does connect to FTP servers, but MacFusion is not directly
comparable to FTP clients =

When you use MacFusion to connect to an FTP server, you're using the
CurlFtpFS plugin. Technically:

> CurlFtpFS is a filesystem for accessing FTP hosts based on FUSE and libcurl


= Not all FTP clients are equal =

Here's where it gets really interesting (or mind-dullingly technical)...

1) Cyberduck has a very elegant interface and some tremendously useful
features, but as I learnt about MacFusion etc., I discovered that
Cyberduck seems to trash users' metadata (Finder comments, colour
labels, resource forks, extended attributes and so on)

-- without advising the user of the loss.

It was decided two years ago that the issue would not be fixed,
<http://trac.cyberduck.ch/ticket/374>, on the assumption that resource
forks will disappear, but resource forks remain widely used (bookmark-
ish .webloc files are a prime example) and moreover:

._ != resource fork

-- the equation is often untrue; dot underscore files occur in many
other situations.

2) I rarely use FileZilla so I can't comment on its feature set.

3) Fugu may be less elegant than Cyberduck but it seems to work well
and if, as sometimes happens, an FTP server can not handle the user's
request, Fugu tends to present an error.

I trust Fugu more than Cyberduck for the simple reason that Fugu is
less likely to lose my metadata.

4) Fetch is well-respected and may well have a feature set superior to
(1), (2) and (3), but it's a very long time since I needed to use it.

Regards
Graham

[leo_yvelines]

Thank you very much for your usefull comments.
I also noticed recently that Cyberduck didn't show all the files
(video records) that were on the disk of my Freebox where FileZilla
and MacFusion (CurlFtpFS) would show them all.

Eric