Subject: Re: Sftp: performance enhancing changes

From: [email-masked] (Peter Gutmann)
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2003 15:24:06 +1200

Damien Miller <[email-masked]> writes:

>What implementation? OpenSSH has pipelined transfers for over a year and a
>half. The code is there for anyone to use...

The existence of a single (with perhaps one or two others) fixed
implementation does not imply any real solution to the problem (it's like a
guy I know who tells everyone who'll listen that X.500 has been a great
success because his company has managed to build an X.500 directory that works
OK most of the time).  There are still large numbers of implementations out
there which get it wrong, and will probably never be fixed because the
implementors couldn't be bothered, and that for entire user populations (and
I'm specifically thinking Windows here) all they'll ever see is the broken
versions.  The solution isn't to jump up and down shouting "Look, we managed
to get it right even if no-one else has", but to address, in the design, why
no-one else is getting it right.  In particular in the Windows market, where
there's no strong need to replace telnet and FTP (which drove SSH adoption in
the Unix world), and SSL support is built into the OS, SSH is going to be a
tough sell when people realise that their favourite GUI file manager with SSH
enabled moved data five times slower than it does without SSH.

Peter.

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From: Markus Friedl <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2003 18:12:18 +0200

> implementation does not imply any real solution to the problem (it's like a

yes, just most of the implementations have this fixed.

> versions.

sure but these implementations have to be fixed in one way
or another, so why fix it by breaking the protocol?