Why is transfer so slow nowadays with Globus

[young madison]

The last time when I used Globus from a network drive/PC to cloud was last year. I remember that it was very fast when I uploaded 10-50GB data. However recently, it takes forever to transfer data, and the average speed was like few hundred kb/s. Is there a way to improve the transfer speed or the Globus transfer speed is just slow recently?

Thanks

[Gigi Kennedy]

Hi,

Globus performance numbers are based on multiple variables. Low quality network paths and underprovisioned DTNs are the most common cause of poor performance. Please take a look at some of our documentation here:
- https://docs.globus.org/faq/transfer-sharing/#what_is_the_effective_transfer_rate_reported_by_globus
- https://docs.globus.org/faq/transfer-sharing/#what_are_gridftp_concurrency_pipelining_parallelism_and_striping
- https://docs.globus.org/faq/transfer-sharing/#how_does_globus_handle_performance_tuning_on_transfers

Advanced endpoint admins can tweak settings for their Globus Connect Server (GCS) endpoint to gain performance. Please check out our documentation here:
- https://docs.globus.org/globus-connect-server-installation-guide/#setting_endpoint_network_use_options
Noting in the above docs, it is the ratio of number of bits transferred to the *total time taken to complete the transfer request*. The total time is calculated from the time the transfer request is submitted to Globus to the time the transfer is completed.

It's important to understand that transfer performance between two endpoints is ultimately limited by system resources available to the systems hosting the endpoints, the performance of the storage systems backing the endpoints, as well as the available bandwidth and reliability of the network(s) connecting the endpoints. 

If you have specifics that you feel need further investigation, please feel free to open a ticket in our Help Desk and we can dig deeper if we are provided more details.

Hope this information was helpful.

Best regards,

  Gigi

Globus Help Desk