There are a number of reasons that could cause FTP performance be (or appear to be) problematic. Here are the most common issues, and some steps to help you find out which, why, and what to do. If you feel you need to report a problem about your FTP, let us know everything you can about the tests you did listed below.
Multiple simultaneous FTP downloads vs. one-at-a-time FTP downloading
This is a great way to test if your ISP is limiting speeds on a per-connection basis. Almost all FTP clients can be told to run multiple simultaneous downloads or just one at time.
- In Filezilla go to edit > settings,
- Click the 'transfers' menu and change the 'maximum simultaneous transfers'
If your per-connection speeds are the same regardless of whether your downloading 1 or 5 files at a time, then your hitting an ISP per-connection limit, and you should revolt against them!
If your overall speeds are the same whether you're downloading 1 or 5 files at a time, then you know the limit lies else where.
Home Internet connections
If you are experiencing speed issues with FTP, an important thing to know is whether or not the bottleneck is related to your home connection.
- With your home computer, use FTP to download from some other fast FTP server other than your seedbox to determine if you get the same, faster, or slower speeds.
- Use a known good connection other than your home connection to download from your seedbox to determine if you get the same, faster, or slower speeds.
Know what your connection can handle, be aware of peak / off-peak usage times/speeds.
FTP and connected peers
An FTP request is given the same priority as each peer connected to your seedbox. - Thus when there are many peers connected to your seedbox the speed of each individual FTP connection may decrease if the available bandwidth is used up.
To test if this is your problem try pausing all your torrents momentarily to see if your FTP download speed increases. If so, there's a good chance the issue is because all the peers your seedbox is connecting to are taking up the available bandwidth. This will resolve itself after torrent activity slows.
You can also use things like rsync and scp to download your data if you have linux or Mac.