curlftps became very slow after upgrade to 13.10.

[Jan Vratny]

After upgrade to 13.10, working on curlftpfs mounted fs became very slow. On 13.04 opening a file from mounted ftp took about 1 sec, after upgrade 10 times longer. Even worse when saving a file. Does not depend on editor i'm using, nor ftp site i'm connected to, happens both on ftp and ftps.

Probably sometimes reconnects, because when i try to save file, sometimes error occurs (cannot write file "filename"), when i try againg, editor complains: "file changed since last save".

release:
Description: Ubuntu 13.10
Release: 13.10

package version:
 apt-cache policy curlftpfs
curlftpfs:
  Installed: 0.9.2-5ubuntu1
  Candidate: 0.9.2-5ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 0.9.2-5ubuntu1 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ saucy/universe i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

if i may provide any more information/debug info, tell me what to type in terminal.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Jan Vratny (jan-vratny)]

Problem remains in 14.04.

[kevinf (kevinf)]

/etc/fstab
curlftpfs#ftp://u:p@server /mnt/mount fuse defaults 0 0

Directory listing is extremely slow on Ubuntu 13.10, this is on a local lan.

Using the same server on my Ubuntu 13.04 is WAY faster.

note: my raring AND saucy machines are running:
ii curlftpfs 0.9.2-5ubuntu1

It is not a bandwidth issue, as cd /mnt/mount && dd if=/dev/zero of=test.me

eg:
On raring, I dd, count to 3, then Ctrl+C, it terminates and transfered 3 seconds worth @ 10MB/s.
On Saucy, I Ctrl+C after 3 seconds, it hangs, and reports 0 bytes of transfer. If I count to 10, it also reports 10MB/s, but only 5 seconds of transfer time.

perhaps its fuse to blame?

raring: ii fuse 2.9.0-1ubuntu3 amd64 Filesystem in Userspace
saucy: ii fuse 2.9.2-4ubuntu3 amd64 Filesystem in Userspace

So I downgraded my saucy machine to libfuse2/fuse @ 2.9.0-1ubuntu3, umounted my share, remount. Same problem.

What else to try?

[kevinf (kevinf)]

futher to the above, i just downgraded gvfs* from 1.18 to 1.16. No change.

root@raring:~# dpkg -l | grep gvfs
ii gvfs:amd64 1.16.1-0ubuntu1.1 amd64 userspace virtual filesystem - GIO module
ii gvfs-backends 1.16.1-0ubuntu1.1 amd64 userspace virtual filesystem - backends
ii gvfs-bin 1.16.1-0ubuntu1.1 amd64 userspace virtual filesystem - binaries
ii gvfs-common 1.16.1-0ubuntu1.1 all userspace virtual filesystem - common data
ii gvfs-daemons 1.16.1-0ubuntu1.1 amd64 userspace virtual filesystem - servers
ii gvfs-libs:amd64 1.16.1-0ubuntu1.1 amd64 userspace virtual filesystem - private

root@saucy:~# dpkg -l | grep gvfs
ii gvfs:amd64 1.16.1-0ubuntu1.1 amd64 userspace virtual filesystem - GIO module
ii gvfs-backends 1.16.1-0ubuntu1.1 amd64 userspace virtual filesystem - backends
ii gvfs-bin 1.16.1-0ubuntu1.1 amd64 userspace virtual filesystem - binaries
ii gvfs-common 1.16.1-0ubuntu1.1 all userspace virtual filesystem - common data files
ii gvfs-daemons 1.16.1-0ubuntu1.1 amd64 userspace virtual filesystem - servers
ii gvfs-libs:amd64 1.16.1-0ubuntu1.1 amd64 userspace virtual filesystem - private libraries

[kevinf (kevinf)]

Solved! http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=176334&pid=1591001#pid1591001

Its libcurl3-gnutls to blame

Raring: 7.29.0-1ubuntu3.4
Saucy: 7.32.0-1ubuntu1.4

Downgrading solves the problem.

[Jan Vratny (jan-vratny)]

Solution worked for me. Thanks.

[Jared (shmup)]

This solution isn't a very good one as of today, because:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
python-pycurl : Depends: libcurl3-gnutls (>= 7.35.0) but 7.29.0-1ubuntu3 is installed

[Greg Bell (gbell-spamless)]

Downgrading as of today (Jan 2015) doesn't seem really feasibile since raring is gone. Can't find libcurl3-gnutls-7.29 anywhere. Isn't this majorly awesome unix-y functionality that everybody uses? Surprised it's broken.

Partial workaround is to use Vim's built-in FTP support. vim ftp://mysite.net/myfile.txt

[Alexander Schittler (damongant)]

This bug makes curlftpfs close to unusable, with up to 3 minutes to get a directory listing after half an hour of use. The thing seems to get progressively slower.

[yehonal (hw-2)]

i've this bug too, curlftpfs is 800% slower compared to ftp clients such as filezilla..
since it seems to be the only way to mount an ftp folder, it must be fixed

[Nathan Rennie-Waldock (nathan-renniewaldock)]

Also affects Ubuntu 12.04.

ii curlftpfs 0.9.2-5 filesystem to access FTP hosts based on FUSE and cURL
ii libcurl3-gnutls 7.22.0-3ubuntu4.14 Multi-protocol file transfer library (GnuTLS)

Directory listings are extremely slow and most of them failed. Copying a file, I'm getting ~300kB/s, compared to 5.2MB/s with lftp.

[Igor A Tarasov (dicr)]

I'm getting file transfer speen 0.4 Mb/s with curlftpfs compared to 2.28Mb/s direct ftp.

[Lops (lops777)]

Same for me on Ubuntu 13.10 - extremely slow on a broadband connection and I am disappointed about the developers not fixing that thing. Seems they do not use their own software.

[Guillaume Soucy (guillaumesoucy)]

I have the same issue, listing directories with only more than 50 items take forever. Please fix this.

[Ubuntu User (j-ubuntu1)]

The issue happened in 16.04 also.

[Mr. Tabarnouche (tabarnak)]

I got 5-6 MB/s when transferring data, its slow only when its time to list directories. More there was directories to list, more it take time to show the listing.

[kevinf (kevinf)]

It is fixed in the latest packages in 16.04 Xenial, I hit an upgrade wall myself, so I was forced to unhold the package.

This is what I currently have installed:

root@brix:~# dgrep libcurl
ii libcurl3:amd64 7.47.0-1ubuntu2.2 amd64 easy-to-use client-side URL transfer library (OpenSSL flavour)
ii libcurl3-gnutls:amd64 7.47.0-1ubuntu2.2 amd64 easy-to-use client-side URL transfer library (GnuTLS flavour)
ii python3-pycurl 7.43.0-1ubuntu1 amd64 Python bindings to libcurl (Python 3)

[ioweb.gr (ioweb.gr)]

@kevinf I just checked and I have the same setup as you but unfortunately very different results.

ii libcurl3:amd64 7.47.0-1ubuntu2.2 amd64 easy-to-use client-side URL transfer library (OpenSSL flavour)
ii libcurl3-gnutls:amd64 7.47.0-1ubuntu2.2 amd64 easy-to-use client-side URL transfer library (GnuTLS flavour)
ii libcurl4-openssl-dev:amd64 7.47.0-1ubuntu2.2 amd64 development files and documentation for libcurl (OpenSSL flavour)
ii python-pycurl 7.43.0-1ubuntu1 amd64 Python bindings to libcurl
ii python3-pycurl 7.43.0-1ubuntu1 amd64 Python bindings to libcurl (Python 3)

it takes over 3 minutes to even execute ls in a directory that contains a curlftpfs mount. Same thing with pressing tab.

[viruslab (viruslab)]

Also confirmed on ubuntu 18.04 curlftpfs still work extremely slow