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I was playing around and noticed that secure-copying with compression takes longer than without compression

time scp -C ./test.sql user@vmware:/home/user

real    0m42.758s
user    0m40.455s
sys     0m2.159s

and

time scp ./test.sql user@vmware:/home/user

real    0m11.117s
user    0m2.827s
sys     0m2.157s

What could be the cause of this behaviour?

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1 Answer 1

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7

Compression and decompression take time, so it's a trade off. If you have a slow network connection, it's worth taking the time for compression. If you have a 1Gbps connection between two nodes, you're probably going to lose more time to compression than you'll gain from transferring less data.

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  • I would add : the 'vmware' server name let me think he's on a local virtualized machine. I don't know precisely how network hardware is involved and limited, but what is certain is that if you scp to a local virtual machine, you should have a really, really good transfer rate... ;)
    – Pierre-Olivier Vares
    Oct 30, 2014 at 17:31
  • @Pierre-OlivierVares you are right, that is a virtual machine. I explicitly specified that :)
    – V G
    Oct 31, 2014 at 8:59

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