scp slowing down a host machine

[josir]

Hi folks,

Frequently, I need to copy a huge file (8Gb) between 2 machines but during the copy, the host machine became very slow and other users complained about it.

I tried to use


nice -n 19 scp backup.tar.gz oracle@192.168.0.12:/mnt/disco2

but machine became slow anyway.

Does somebody has any suggestion on how to slow down the copy ?

[Jon Monreal]

By all indications, performance with scp is awful (http://www.spikelab.org/transfer-largedata-scp-tarssh-tarnc-compared/) for large files to begin with.

With rsync, you can use the perameter --bwlimit= with an amount in KBPS to limit the speed. I'm not sure if this might help.

[gmargo]

According to the fine man page, there is also a bandwidth limiting option for scp:


-l limit
Limits the used bandwidth, specified in Kbit/s.
Although I personally prefer rsync because it can be interrupted and restarted without losing data already transfered, unlike scp.

[codemaniac]

+1 for rsync .. :)