Does FTP Hog Network Bandwidth?

[Rob Schneider]

I was in a corporate technology course last few days. Heard that it was
the corporate technology position to discourage use of ftp on the
corporate tcp/ip network because ftp, "hogs" network bandwidth. They
explained that if a user were to download a big file file (not sure what
"big" is) that the network would be saturated and other users would be
adversely affected.

I never heard of this.

Does ftp do something "special" to grab the entire network bandwidth on
say a token ring (they still have a few of these) or a switched or
non-switched ethernet?

I had a hard time believing it. I always thought that TCP/IP networks
would approportion bandwidth to all demands ... yes, with multiple
simultanous demands and fixed bandwidth, things might slow down, but to
"hold on to and hog" all network resources ... I didn't think this possible.

True?

rms

 

[Ron Lowe]

I was in a corporate technology course last few days. Heard that it was
the corporate technology position to discourage use of ftp on the
corporate tcp/ip network because ftp, "hogs" network bandwidth. They
explained that if a user were to download a big file file (not sure what
"big" is) that the network would be saturated and other users would be
adversely affected.

I never heard of this.

Does ftp do something "special" to grab the entire network bandwidth on
say a token ring (they still have a few of these) or a switched or
non-switched ethernet?

I had a hard time believing it. I always thought that TCP/IP networks
would approportion bandwidth to all demands ... yes, with multiple
simultanous demands and fixed bandwidth, things might slow down, but to
"hold on to and hog" all network resources ... I didn't think this possible.

True?

rms

Downloading a large file will certaily adversely affect
other users sharing the same bandwidth.

But I can't see why a large download by FTP should be any worse
than the same large download over HTTP, P2P, NFS, SMB
or any other mechanism.

No, FTP doesn't do anything 'special' to grab bandwidth.
It just sends packets over a TCP connection, which will be
contended the same as the others.

 

[Pavel A.]

I was in a corporate technology course last few days. Heard that it was
the corporate technology position to discourage use of ftp on the
corporate tcp/ip network because ftp, "hogs" network bandwidth.

FTP does not "hog"bandwidth - it utilizes it
You have two options:
a. Use other file transfer apps that are able to throttle network utilization.
For example, Microsoft BITS
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/techinfo/overview/bits.mspx

b. Being a big, serious enterprise you can afford smart LAN switches with QoS and traffic shaping capability.
Your technology course should have covered this topic

--PA