Slow D/L speeds on FTP links, Cloud storage links like WeTransfer - Network Troubleshooting

Flame Hardware Questions
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1

Hello Pals,

I’ve been struggling with something that is puzzling as of late.
I have been experiencing extremely slow D/L speeds when shared links are given to me… yet I can not determine why.

On Speedtest.net I am getting 936mb Down, and about the same UP.
When Files have been shared w me from clients this past week I am only getting max speeds between 8-38mbpps! (connecting to client FTP and WeTransfer)

Machines on my network that I’ve tried:

On my 10gig E network - Linux machine using firefox.
Also attempted My Windows VM using Filezilla, same results.

Macbook on WIfi. ( 180mbs d/l speed when tested)
I am getting the same identical results on WIFI download from Macbook.
I have tried using Safari, Firefox, and Ftp applications

There are no Firewalls set on any of these machines.
Mac has antivirus, and so does the Windows VM machine (Bitdefender) and I don’t believe it to be interfering.
The network router is plugged in directly via ethernet into the machine running Linux Flame/Windows VM
no special restrictions placed what so ever

What else do I do/check?

2

Which precise services are slow? Because most ftps and WeTransfer absolutely will not saturate your connection. Typically, the only services that will saturate your connection, or at least your licensed throughput, are google drive sometimes, masv, anything direct to cloud storage, Aspera, Sohonet, etc.

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4

After years of battling with this, I have found that Frame.io and google drive are the best “bang for buck” - if you are on a budget.

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6

I move around a lot and often have to upload from remote places, I’ve found dropbox to have the best coverage worldwide. I love dropbox, it’s a brilliant system of delivery.

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7

I am familiar and have used ALL of the above mentioned services.
BY FAR, MASV is THE BEST…but expensive

However… This was not the question/problem.
Alas, I am troubleshooting whether or not there’s any slowdown on my part.
I can not control where my files come from, and can not demand that they get an MASV account just for me.

I was trying to figure out if there was something internal that could be affecting my Downloads as the links I mention are being shared with me from a very well known prestigious Transfer House, with claims from the head colorist/owner that he gets speeds of 350mps using filezilla with their ftp. Short of calling him a liar, I was just trying to do some extra homework on the subject to see if anything on my network might be a problem contributor.

8

Like I said FTP sucks. And these ‘claims’ are worthless. You can’t count on ftps. They are slow and insecure and there’s a reason the major players don’t use them.

You dont have anything wrong internally. They don’t need a masv account, they can upload to yours. Masv isn’t that expensive when you look at her time it saves.

The only thing you can do is up
the number of connections to 10 in FileZilla. Aside from that you are a passenger on the ftp train. Expect crummy service, delays, and crummy Wi-Fi. :slight_smile:

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9

This is what I suspected… but I suppose I wanted the confirmation from others that there is nothing else that I can do other than supply them a different option for hosting on my own dollar/time.

Flame On!
D

10

fromsmash.com

If you still use wetransfer , try this, much faster, I was able to upload and download at like 5Gbit from a datacenter connection… :smiley:

frameIO transfer is flipping the fastest though apart from aspera which is complete nuts but also costs a bazillion dollars

more elaborate thing would be accsyn its also very cool like a selfhosted aspera type thingymagingle. not really for sendiong stuff to clients though.

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I’ll check it out. thx

12

its unlimited as well, I have done like 600gb transfers before… they use AWS and I have 0 idea how they pay for all of this, maybe its a build-up the company and hope someone buys the technology kinda moves … no idea reminds me of silicon valley (the tv show) .

So for Now we can use it but its bound to get to the same issues that wetrasnfer has (they used to be fast, but they where killed by costs so now they are established but slooowww)

13

One thing that really bugs me is when people just send a scattergun of links. I just had that on a job and it was a nightmare. Loads of separate links spread across endless email chains. I always feel like you should have a repository of the files sent and do it in such a way that they can quickly double check what they have against what you have sent.

Screenshot 2022-01-23 at 22.51.45
Screenshot 2022-01-23 at 22.51.451200×1040 253 KB

So for example that’s how I deliver files via dropbox, in batches clearly numbered and labeled. They can instantly double check what they have against what I’ve uploaded. Also if one delivery element was missed it would be immediately obvious because the numbered sequence would be incomplete. They always have a link to the enclosing folder and if they ever need to re-access a batch they can no problem.

14

for collaboration with other artist solutions like DropBox are the best but Dropbox in particular can be very funny sometimes , I was locked out of my account before because of too much traffic e.t.c …

I use synology Drive for this, its just great.

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Yeah I heard that happened to someone too! Was really surprised it wasn’t me because I am an insanely heavy user. I have some drone guys in the UK and we transfer so many TB of data. 200gb per batch folder and the last job we did 2.5tb and thats pretty average, but luckily never had a problem.

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yea its not fun when it happens during production :confused: a dropbox support wasnt a great help…

If you have nerdy friends you can also use this for speedy point to point transfers:

Synology Drive has some core advantages as it costs nothing, you can have many clients all syncing and working in the same folder structure, you can do selective syncs and you have as much storage as you want as it is not relying on any cloud provider, I keep like 5 synology NAS fully synced up across Europe and it works very nicely ,cool is also if you sync to a NAS it can do overnight syncs without your machine having to be on e.t.c.
10/10

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17

When my clients tell me the files will come from anything other than Frame.io then I offer them my frame project and just upsize the storage for the month.

18

I actually made an attempt to troubleshoot the dismal 8mbps I was getting from WeTransfer… while my D/L clocks @ 930 down, and roughly the same Up.
It seems that you guys are right, the service sucks. see below:

(WeTransfer Support)

Jan 24, 2022, 10:07 GMT+1

Hi again,

Thanks for getting back to me.

In regards to your slow download speeds, I can confirm that, after discussing your case with our engineers, we’re unable to give you a concrete solution to improve your speeds with WeTransfer. Please allow me to explain why this is, and hopefully provide some context as to the ‘why’ behind this inability to assist:

The gaps you see in the transmission of your download comes from the fact that our download servers work in a “tick-tock” cycle. During the “tick” step, the download server retrieves a segment of an object on AWS (Amazon Web Service) S3 and stores it in it’s RAM, in an in-memory filesystem. During the “tock” step, that data gets sent out to CloudFront by writing the segment file from the in-memory filesystem to the socket that is associated to a specific downloader - in this case you. In your case, however, with your download speed, these nearly equal out or you are able to pull faster than we can pull from S3 on your behalf.

We load-balance our download servers based on the average download speeds people have + the number of connections we can handle safely and some. Since, we serve a few hundreds of people from a single download server. This makes it impossible to know how “fast” a particular client is going to be pulling prior to its download starting, we can’t anticipate ahead of time which of our download servers will be the best to handle that client. There are also a number of limiting factors, including; the speed at which our servers can pull from S3, the number of downloads we’re currently servicing, the outgoing/incoming bandwidth of our download servers, and more.

So in practical terms, the only way for us to guarantee that one single downloader can consume the maximum available speed/throughput (about 400MBps - 500Mpbs) would be to allocate one single download server for every downloading customer, in its entirety. This would be an extremely expensive proposition for us.

So while we can’t promise that it’s going to get better soon, we are aware that some people with very fast connections are not going to get their connections utilized to the fullest. This is why we’ve devised an in-house speed test that allows our engineers to investigate these cases.

So, if you’d like to help us make better predictions about download speeds, feel free to let me know and I’ll proceed by sending you over the instructions.

If you want to know more about our download flow, feel free to have a look at this presentation:

Do not hesitate to contact me if you have any more questions about anything that I’ve mentioned.

Thanks for your understanding,

WeTransfer Support

:nauseated_face: :face_vomiting:

19

What kind of speeds were you getting with WT?

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8MB/SEC download max

21

That’s nuts. Have you tried Digital Pigeon? I’ve been happy with it.