Slow Transfer Speed when Transferring Files on LAN from PC to Phone

[rudyh246]

Hi there. I'm having a bit of a problem with my HTC EVO 4G LTE. I'm rooted and am running Android 4.0.4 and Software Version: 2.13.651.1 710RD.

I recently started trying to set up a way to easily and quickly transfer files from my computer to my phone so I wouldn't have to hook it up via USB every time I wanted to put a file on my phone. I figured a LAN connection transfer would work fine, so I got ES File Manager and made some folders on my PC shared.

I went to LAN under ES File Manager and found my PC, connected to it with my username/pass, and found a file I wanted on my phone, and copied it over. It worked fine, but it was rather slow for a LAN connection; it took about 4 minutes to transfer a 123mb file, so about 0.51 megabytes/sec.

Can anyone offer any ideas as to why my file transfer is going so slow, despite being connected via LAN Wifi??

 

[RobsTV]

Just purchased the HTC EVO 4g LTE and similar problem. Phone is latest version, shipped with everything as of April 2013. Unlocked and rooted, otherwise stock.

Transferring a 600 meg iso test file from server PC to phone and am lucky to get 10Mbps (1.25MB/s) over wifi LAN (router DD-WRT has bandwidth monitoring graph), and after 1 minute only 7% transferred. When I click Wifi then my router, phone shows link speed of 52Mbps to 65Mbps (which is the phones max I think). Using 4 year old laptop it takes 90 seconds over same wifi to transfer the same file and router bandwidth shows avg about 60Mbps. Connecting phone to laptop via USB, then use phone as external USB device and same ES File manager, and same fast speed as laptops. This shows that my phones ext sd card (class 10 = minimum 80+Mbps) and other hardware can handle the speed, and the only thing different is using slow wifi from phone or normal faster speed from laptop.

Cisco/Linksys E2000 router with DD-WRT. Have tried 2.4g, 5g, every channel on both as well as different security settings. Router status settings show actual wireless rate of 300Mbps to 150Mbps depending on how I set it up, and laptop confirms it has the speed. Read all the info I could find over the past 3 days and have ran out of things to try. Even bought another router, TP-Link TL-WR940N, and exact same results no matter what settings I used.

This is almost exactly like the common issue Nexus 4 users are complaining about, another JB device, and looks as though something in JB is the culprit. Google android issue 40306 and see how rampant this JB problem is. None of the "possible fixes" listed helped.

Even though the wifi specs on the phone are better than my laptop, I am fine with it being only as fast as the laptop, or even a little slower. 40Mbps (5MB/s) seems like the minimum I should be getting on a bad day, yet it breaks a sweat hitting 10Mbps (1.25MB/s).

Please, any ideas or at least others with similar equipment showing better results?

Thanks,
Rob

EDIT: My HTC One V as well as HP Touchpad running ICS have the same very slow wifi lan transfers. Yet any Windows machine (4 laptops and HTPC) all transfer same file at around 60 Mbps or better.

 

[benny3]

Your limited to what your sdcard can do and if your getting 10Mbps on a class 6 card than i say your doing good

 

[RobsTV]

Your limited to what your sdcard can do and if your getting 10Mbps on a class 6 card than i say your doing good

Made a mistake on my SD card type in first post (now corrected). Used a class 10 card, not a class 6. I am getting 60Mbps on the ext SD card in phone, as shown above by the test that downloaded same file into phone with phone set as external drive connected by USB to laptop. Class 6 is rated at minimum 6 MB/sec or 48 Mb/s, and class 10 is rated at minimum 10 MB/sec or 80 Mb/s. This Sandisk Ultra class 10 tops out around 15 MB/s write speed, (120Mbps) and much faster than that for read speeds, yet LAN speed tests were the same slow 10Mbps both ways when tested with phones wifi..

I would be happy if the wifi could even do 40Mbps.

One more quick note on card speed. With this phone being capable of 1080p video, I don't think you could get by with an SD card that would not at least to 4 MB/s (32Mbps), and a class 10 card might be required, which is why I went that route.

To put the speed of the LAN transfer in perspective, the 10Mbps speed is 5 times "slower" than an old 54g router, and a little slower than even wireless b. Again though, this is for LAN, and nothing to do with Internet speeds..

 

[colin booth]

I have a Nexus 5 4.4.2 & an old xperia 4.0.4, both have very slow lan transfer (wifi) to a Window 7 system. They connect using ES Explorer or File Manager over an 11G link. The data throughput is half that of a windows XP connected to the same server by the same wifi AP. As far as I can tell the android system actually negotiates data transfers of less than 5K while the XP client negotiates 32k. This results in a much higher number of SMB read requests having to be sent by android than XP. I suspect that this is the cause of the terrible performance. On a GigE wire XP will negotiate an even larger transfer size and is very much faster. Even though Windows 7 supports SMB2 android does not appear to try to negotiate an SMB2 connection.

This problem appears to have been around for a very long time. It could be a design feature to avoid using too much ram and/or CPU on old and low spec devices. Run wireshark on the PC to trace the network traffic. It runs on Windows and Linux, I have no idea if it runs on Mac. I have seen no evidence of any interest in fixing this problem in stock android.