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SFTP is a secure file transfer protocol sending data over encripted SSH transport. One should notice that it's a single-stream protocol. It can also be significantly slower than others due to its internal data encription. The protocol doesn't seem to be optimized for transferring data over WAN. Our preliminary tests (in a specific setup between SLAC and IN2P3/France) indicate that the maximum transfer rate would be less than 0.5 MBytes/sec. This is nearly 3 times less than it can be achieved with specialized tools like BBCP or FDT.

Note, that there is a similar (though, simpler) protocol called SCP. IN terms of its performance it has no difference from SFTP as they're both based on SSH.

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