faster way to mount a remote file system than sshfs?

Question

I have been using sshfs to work remotely, but it is really slow and annoying, particularly when I use eclipse on it.

Is there any faster way to mount the remote file system locally? My no.1 priority is speed.

Remote machine is Fedora 15, local machine is Ubuntu 10.10. I can also use Windows XP locally if necessary.

Answer 1

sshfs is using the SSH file transfer protocol, which means encryption.

If you just mount via NFS, it's of course faster, because not encrypted.

are you trying to mount volumes on the same network? then use NFS.

Answer 2

NFS should be faster. How remote is the filesystem? If it's over the WAN, you might be better off just syncing the files back and forth, as opposed to direct remote access.

Answer 3

Besides already proposed solutions of using Samba/NFS, which are perfectly valid, you could also achieve some speed boost sticking with sshfs by using more quick encryption (authentication would be as safe as usual, but transfered data itself would be easier to decrypt) by supplying -oCipher=arcfour option to sshfs. It is especially useful if your machine has weak CPU.

Answer 4

SSHFS is really slow because it transfers the file contents even if it does not have to (when doing cp). I reported this upstream and to Debian, but no response :/

Answer 5

Either NFS or Samba if you have large files. Using NFS with something like 720p Movies and crap is really a PITA. Samba will do a better job, tho i dislike Samba for a number of other reasons and i wouldn't usually recommend it.

For small files, NFS should be fine.

Answer 6

If speed is of the essence, why not consider Rsync? The trade-off is in space utilization.

A good distributed vcs like GIT can also be an alternative in some cases.

Answer 7

Login as root.

Access your top level directory, by using "cd /".

Then ensure that you have a mount folder created or create one using "mkdir folder_name".

After that, simply use "mount x.x.x.x:/remote_mount_directory /local_mount_directory.

if everything worked on your end, before this you should have a successful mount. You might want to check and make sure the destination directory is shared by using the "exportfs" command to gurantee they are able to be found.

Hope this helps. This is not from a lvie environment, it has been tested on a LAN using VMware and Fedora 16.