scp to/from slow machines
If you are using scp to move files between machines where one or both sides have a slow processor, you might find significantly increased speeds if you specify that the cipher used should be blowfish instead of the default ‘3des‘. (This is for cases where single-threaded CPU hits a bottleneck before network or IO limits become a constraint.) When copying large files from my MacBook Pro to a 1ghz Niagara box I see the throughput increase from ~ 4.5-4.7MB/sec to ~ 7.1 MB/sec.
Use the -’c’ option to specify the cipher.
Example: scp -c blowfish file.tar $user@$host:/path/to/file.tar