OS X: Why takes Panic’s Transmit so much longer to transfer a text file via SFTP than Cyberduck? Compression!

I do love Transmit for its smart Finder integration, e.g. mounting remote hosts as “disks” within Finder or quickly opening connections saved as droplets directly from Spotlight.

But… I was quite shocked to find it takes Transmit 10 times longer than Cyberduck to transfer text files when using SFTP – 2 minutes instead of 12 seconds for a 20+ MB server.log via a 2 Mbit line (I know it’s slow, it’s not mine…) 😡

Why? Compression?

It took some time of fiddling to uncover Transmit uses OS X standard ssh configuration settings as defined within ~/.ssh/config or /etc/ssh/ssh_config.

Thus I created ~/.ssh/config containing

Host *
Compression yes
CompressionLevel 9

et voilà, Transmit now compresses files on-the-fly as well 😀

About Reiner

Born 1954 in Ratisbon (Bavaria, Germany), in 1976 punched cards at Berlin Technical University, caught hacking one of its mainframes by Horst Zuse (son of Konrad Zuse), started studying computer science and soon was offered a job whithin their computer department doing systems programming for IBM VM/370. While studying, jobbed around Germany at various places doing all sorts of things, then returned to Berlin to work at SRZ (computer aided typesetting). Never finished my master degree, but chose to take up self-employed work (which didn't turn me rich nor famous). Now working for a mid-sized software company within a very promising department as head of server software development.

View all posts by Reiner →

This entry was posted in Apple, Mac OS X. Bookmark the permalink.