SCP speed question

[Michael Hipp]

Alma J Wetzker wrote:
> What speed should you get with scp on a 100 Mb/s backbone?  I backup my
> home directory with scp to my server and I am getting 3.8 MB/s.  That
> seems a bit slow to me.

I don't remember any numbers but that speed looks fairly normal. I've found 
scp to be rather pokey. It especially seems to loiter for a long time during 
the beginning and ending phases of transferring each file.

rsync over an ssh tunnel is *much* faster, even on the initial copy. And just 
as secure.

Michael