How to improve the Performance of FtpWebRequest?

Question

I have an application written in .NET 3.5 that uses FTP to upload/download files from a server. The app works fine but there are performance issues:

1. It take

Answer 1

AFAIK, each FtpWebRequest has to set up a new connection - including logon to the server. If you want to speed up the FTP transfers, I would recommend that you use an alternate FTP client instead. Some of these alternate clients can login and then perform multiple actions using the same command connection.

Examples of such clients incldue: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/IP/FtpClient.aspx which also includes a good explanation as to why these libraries can operate faster than the standard FtpWebRequest and http://www.codeproject.com/KB/macros/ftp_class_library.aspx which looks like a simple enough implementation also.

Personally, I rolled my own implementation of FTP back in the .NET 1.1 days before the FtpWebRequest was introduced and this still works well for .NET 2.0 onwards.