I installed a gigabit network switch and a gigabit enabled laptop wifi
adapter (with gigabit, obviously, available on ethernet ports only) in
my house.

Two computers in my home are connected to the switch and one (laptop)
to the wifi adaptor.

The highest possible speed of a gigabit connection is about 111
megabytes per second.

Naturally, I did some tests with a noncompressible 1 gigabyte long
file (fragment of some gzipped file exactly one GB long).

My first test was to scp files from one computer on the switch to
another. Here, I was disappointed as the highest speed was only 22
megabytes per second one way and 46 another way. About 20 and 40
percent of maximum.

Then I tried using HTTP to transfer the same file (both computers are
webservers). To my huge surprise, it made a world of difference and
the transfer speed was 111 or so megabytes per second.

So, now I have a dilemma, I have a fast pipe, but scp is not fast
enough (given my CPU) to encrypt/decrypt so much data.

I tried something else, which is doing wc -l on a NFS mounted drive
(same two computers). It was UNBELIEVABLY slow and the load average on
the NFS server shot WAY up. Transferring a 336 MB file took 157
seconds, or about e megabytes per second (vs 111 mbps that I achieved
with HTTP).

So, the conclusion is, HTTP is fast (no wonder), SSH is "medium",
and NFS is "slow, very bad".

The connection to laptop is a disappointment in its own right, since
even with all-ethernet connection, I get about 3 megabytes per
second. I think that I need to pull a new wire in the wall.

So, the short of it is that there is much work to be done.

i