Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcharawi | Hacker News Reader

Hey HN! I'm Mahamad, co-founder of Tachyon Transfer, where we're building faster file transfer tools for developers. We've spent the last year building an ultra-fast FTP replacement, and we thought we'd show you guys what our technical process was like. Let me know if you have any questions!

View on HN

Please show performance tests versus hpn-ssh, GridFTP (aka, the defacto tool of the particle physics and genetics research communities) and simpler systems like wget2's multi-threaded mode.

Would also be nice to compare against different standard TCP congestion avoidance algs, of which there's plenty.

It is, after all, a very well researched area.

Can I tunnel this over SSH and use it the same way as faster drop-in replacement for SFTP? (Why not?)

Standard SSH uses TCP over port 22 by default, so it wouldn't be possible without modifying SSH to use a different protocol. That being said, however, our protocol uses TLS over UDP via the OpenSSL libraries so it is secure by default. We also offer a BSD-style socket interface that you can use if you want a drop in replacement for TCP sockets. Shoot me a note at mahamad _at_ trytachyon _dot_ com if you want to chat!

What's the difference between "TLS over UDP" and Quic? Did you compare your solution to some Quic implementation?

Also, how was CPU usage? In my experience UDP-based stream protocols do signifanctly worse (I assume due to user-space scheduling and unoptimized hot paths). This may be particularly relevant for laptops and mobile.

> What's the difference between "TLS over UDP" and Quic?

QUIC is much much more than TLS over UDP.

how much?

Ha! Around 4 RFCs and 20 Internet Drafts more: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/quic/documents/

Can you share some actual performance numbers across whatever are the key metrics that you observe?

Is this software that one licenses and uses on any arbitrary network or do you run a network of some kind that users pay to access?

Or both ?

I think this is a software package but the tl;dr doesn’t make that clear to me…

At the moment we offer both options. We offer our own network with a pricing plan similar to massive.io (though 10c per gb vs 25c) Our licensing is cheaper but requires large volumes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com