sshfs mount without compression or encryption

Question

I am a very frequent user of sshfs for mounting various disks over the network. I do however have a very small machine (with an atom processor) from which I need to mount a directory using sshfs.

Is it possible to disable all compression, and perhaps even also encryption when mounting using sshfs, as to limit the cpu usage on the machine from which the directory is mounted?

Answer 1

Although the high performance ssh adds a none cipher, the arcfour cipher is nearly as fast and is included standard.

Use: -o Ciphers=arcfour

I've been using this over the local network and I get about 85% of 100Mbps Ethernet or about 10.625MB/s

(In response vava's answer, sshfs would still be what it is even when ssh's encryption is off as the authentication protocol would still be active without which you might as well be using telnet.)

Answer 2

There is no way to disable encryption - this is ssh after all. And it looks like compression is disabled by default as you have to request it with the -C switch.

But you may want to check your ~/.ssh/config file for settings regarding compression. If you add the following lines at the top of that file, compression should be disabled:

Host *
    Compression no

Answer 3

You can mount with -o compression=no to turn the compression off. It is not possible to turn encryption off, wouldn't be sshfs after that :) If it is slow I suggest to use other way to mount a directory, like through samba, nfs or ftp.

Answer 4

Use sshfs + socat

Check this out: http://pl.atyp.us/wordpress/index.php/2009/09/file-transfer-fun/