Motivation

SSH is often used to transfer files (or streams), by scp (always) and often by rsync (if used over ssh, i.e. with option --rsh ssh).

By default ssh as well as rsync tend to try to compress the data transferred. This is useful over slow connections, like a typical SOHO internet line, especially when using the slow upload channel of asynchronous technologies or plans.

If the network connection is fast, as in a GBit connection within a LAN or DMZ, even with top-notch CPUs those compressions become bottlenecks and reduce the transferspeed from say 100 MB/s to 25 MB/s or even less.

Therefore it sometimes makes a lot of sense and saves a lot of time to suppress those compression attempts.

Supressing ssh's compression

To suppress ssh's compression for a specific scp call, add -o 'Compression no'.

To generally suppress ssh's compression for connections to certain hosts create or adapt Host section(s) in /etc/ssh/ssh_config or ~/.ssh/config, like this:

This applies to all ssh conctions to those host(s), wether you use ssh, scp, or rsync over ssh) 

Suppressing rsync's compression

If calling rsync directly, do NOT use --compress (resp. -z).

Some rsync wrappers like our xsync script add (i.e. "inject") --compress for remote connections automatically, but allow to pass through further rsync options. In that case add --compress-level=0.

Special note for rsync over ssh

If using rsync over ssh, both tools's compression attempts must be avoided seperately!