Speed

Files.com is designed for speed and performance as well as security and flexibility.

In order to support the fastest possible speeds, we have built many optimizations into the apps that we provide. These optimizations include things like automatically tuned parallelism, intelligent routing around corporate firewalls, and more.

We have also added much of this technology into our SDKs.

The most important thing to do in order to optimize speed is to use one of our custom-built apps. Here are our apps ranked by speed:

• Files.com Command Line App (CLI) - Our fastest app is command-line only, but supports a wide variety of sync scenarios and scriptability. The CLI supports our most advanced acceleration technology and always wins hands down in speed tests.
• Files.com Desktop App for Windows/Mac - This app is integrated with the Windows Explorer and MacOS Finder and provides highly tuned upload and download performance. This app is also where Files.com is putting many of its development efforts around speed, so investing in this app will be the best way to benefit from future improvements.
• Files.com Mobile App for iOS/Android - If you are on a mobile device, leverage our mobile apps for iOS and Android for fast parallel file transfers.
• Files.com SDKs for Developers - Our SDKs include the same optimization technology as our CLI app for optimum speed.

Cyberduck is a third party app that offers native Files.com integration in a client that works like a typical FTP client. If our Desktop App is unable to work for you due to your configuration, we recommend Cyberduck.

Download Cyberduck from Cyberduck website

Once inside Cyberduck, do not choose FTP or SFTP as the connection type. There is a Files.com option when you go to add a new server.

If none of the best options work, you can achieve fairly good upload and download performance using the Files.com web interface. Because web browsers vary, the exact experience will depend on your web browser.

Many customers ask us about optimizing FTP, SFTP, or WebDAV connections for speed. Our first answer to that is to try to use one of our native apps if at all possible. FTP, SFTP, and WebDAV are all older, limited technologies that will never produce the fastest speed.

If you are stuck using one of these older technologies, we recommend you do the following:

1. Prefer WebDAV, FTP, and SFTP in that order. Our modern version of FTP uses the same encryption strength as SFTP and is much faster. WebDAV is even better due to its reduced network overhead.
2. Enable at least 10, and no more than 25 parallel connections in your app. More parallelism is generally better, but we've found that above 25 can cause problems for several apps.

If you are using 2FA (Two Factor Authentication), you must not use parallelism with FTP, SFTP, or WebDAV, because 2FA is only valid for one connection at a time. This is one more reason that these protocols are suboptimal for speed.

File transfer speeds can also be affected by the use of a Custom Domain and Regional Storage.

The best transfer speeds will occur when the custom domain and storage both reside in the same region.

For more detail, refer to Performance Implications (Custom Domain) and Caveat when using a Custom Domain (Regional Storage).