scp timings

[Patrick Avery <psavery@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi there!

I'm a fairly new programmer - I've been programming in C++ for about a
year. I just wrote my first C program using LibSSH that contains some scp
functions I intend for my research group's program to use.

Well, after writing a recursive scp program using these functions (that
operates similarly to the scp that comes with openssh in linux), I'm very
pleased to say that I noticed it is actually FASTER than the scp that comes
with openssh (default one on Ubuntu) for the size of directories that our
group's program uses.

Details: For my 2.2 megabyte directory I tested (out of 10 runs each): for
scp from remote to local, the openssh scp took on average 3.30 seconds and
my scp that I wrote took 2.67 seconds. For scp from local to remote, the
openssh scp took on average 2.40 seconds and my scp that I wrote took 1.80
seconds. For files and directories of much larger size, my scp took about
the same amount of time (and perhaps a little longer) compared to the
openssh scp.

Anyways, I'm not sure if writing an scp program (using LibSSH) that's
faster than the openssh scp is surprising to you all or not. But I thought
I'd mention it in case it was! I know that my program can probably be
further optimized as well (the speed is probably not completely optimized
yet)...

If you want to look at it, it's on my github page at
https://github.com/psavery/scp
I also included more details on the time tests in the timings.txt file that
is on that github page.

Let me know what you think.

Thanks,
Patrick