[Technical] FTP performance

[Jim Maunder]

Hello All -

I have a small technical query about FTP/network throughput/Windows 
disk performance. I am fairly ignorant about such things, having just 
enough knowledge to be a danger to the organisation.

Nearly every term break I re-image the lab computers, and in the past 
have used DOS boot disks to either connect to a Windows share (using 
Windows for Workgroups extensions for DOS) on a Win98 machine, or to 
a network drive (using a DOS ODI driver) and DriveImage2000. More 
recently I have been using Novell StoreManager on a WinPE DVD to 
connect to a FTP servers. Last year the FTP server was our intranet 
box (running some kind of linux). A typical re-image would take 12 
mins for 1 PC, 30 minutes for 2 PCs and an hour for 6 PCs.

This year I have been using a WinXP box (plenty big, lots of RAM, 
single SATA disk, gigabyte LAN card) with FileZilla FTP server 
running, and this is where my query comes from. A typical re-image 
now takes about 7 minutes (the same tame it would take to copy the 
image files from the server) for a single PC, 45 minutes for 2 PCs 
and 2 hours for 6 PCs. What causes this dramatic reduction in speed, 
and is there a workaround that does not involve Ghost or Zenworks?

(This time I do 2 PCs at a time - one via the network and FTP, the 
other using a 16Gb USK stick, and this keeps me fully occupied as 
both take about 6-7 minutes to do)

Sorry about the longwinded waffle, but I got to the question eventually.

rgds
Jim





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Jim Maunder
Laptop and PC Support Technician
Ruyton Girls School
Melbourne, Australia
ph 03 9290 9374