Anyone familiar with FTP and stuff?

[indecks]

OK, I know how to FTP, that's not the issue but my question is this..

I remember back when uploading something via FTP was only as slow as your connection. But lately I've been paying more attention to when I upload stuff to my Xbox360 or PS3 hdds, relatively small games (6 to 8 gigs) take for-friggin-EVER to upload like 45 minutes to an hour, while larger games that are comprised of only huge files (like .sarcs and .arcs) will take 20 minutes. I think I've discovered why - and I want to see if I can fix it. The pc the games are being sent from has a gigabit NIC, the PS3 has a gigabit NIC and the switch between them is gigabit, so there's no bottleneck, except for the 360's piddly 10/100 NIC.

Some games have these giant 2+ gig files and they upload at something like 25-30mB a second. Which is great. But when some games have these zillions of little tiny 2kb or 100kb files, it takes FOREVER to finish. The files are uploaded quickly but the FTP program I use (FlashFXP) is constantly 'communicating' that its working.

Basically a file transfer goes like this:

[R] STOR uSm5036i.arc
[R] 150 Opening BINARY mode data connection
[R] 226 Transfer Complete
[R] MFMT 20120925205224 uSm5036i.arc
[R] 250 MFMT command successful.
Transferred: uSm5036i.arc 1.23 MB in 0.41 seconds


1.23 megs is miniscule in the grand scheme of things and yes it only takes .41 seconds to upload it but the program is literally saying

Gonna prepare to upload.
Preparing to upload
Uploading.
Uploading about to complete
Completing upload
Upload complete
I uploaded it and it was complete.

I DONT CARE. It completely slows down everything. It takes longer to tell me that the file is uploaded than it takes to actually upload the damn file!

Just copy everything over and be done with it. No need for messages or confirmations. I know in the past uploading stuff was MUCH faster. Is there a setting that I've accidentally tripped that made it start doing this? I've been uploading a 6 gig game for like an hour and the 'queue time' listed says something like 3 hours left! wtf is going on here?

[Hobie-wan]

That's how file transfers work. The same thing happens copying files between hard drives, compressing and extracting files, setting file permissions on a large portion of a drive or directory, and other scenarios. Every file has to have an entry added into the table of contents and verify that it made it ok. There's overhead that applies to every individual file that's handled. If this is done once for a very large file, it is barely noticeable in comparison. If it has to happen hundreds of times on small files, it adds up.

[indecks]

Is there any way to make it faster? I know in the past when FTPing from one computer to another on a local ntwk was much faster. I remember seeing the scrolling text just fly by and the progress bar for the file was blinking like crazy.

[MrPopo]

You're being bound by your disk IO. The only way to increase things would be to get a faster HDD in the target machine.

[irixith]

Store all the small files in an uncompressed archive/iso/etc. Copy that one file. Extract when it reaches the target.

[indecks]

Store all the small files in an uncompressed archive/iso/etc. Copy that one file. Extract when it reaches the target.

Hm. That might be an idea. Problem is I'm not sure I can do that with the PS3 or 360hdds through the FTP program.

@Popo as far as I can recall, the 360/PS3 drives are SATA, which I assume are at least 7200rpm.