I decided to do some informal benchmark comparisons between using windows SMBFS and apache/webdav for file transfers. I ended up finding that apache is actually faster at sending files over an SSL connection than a plain connection. I downloaded a ~600 meg test file from the server using windows explorer webfolders, IE, and firefox. Firefox downloads the file in the 4000-5000 KB/s range when using an SSL connection. IE gets over 10,000 KB/s downloading over the secure connection. Both only are able to download at 300-600 KB/s using the non SSL connection though. This is, of course, all done over a 100 Mbps ethernet network that is minimally loaded, and I repeated the test a few times, clearing the browsers caches each time.
Needless to say, this is very strange. My client machine is running windows 2000 pro, and the server is running windows 2003 server, with apache 2.0.52 installed. Does anyone have any ideas to possibly explain and correct these results?
