emacs tramp performance

Question

Is there a way to improve emacs tramp performance? For me it's faster to open an external ftp client (filezilla), transfer files to the local disk and open them in an external editor (notepad) than open them with emacs. I use emacs23.1 under windows xp. I tried different tramp-default-method (telnet, pscp, ftp), all of them have the same performance.

Profiling results with elp-instrument-package are the following (I opened 3 remote files of 1.5 MB each one)

tramp-file-name-handler                                1461        350.41599999  0.2398466803
tramp-sh-file-name-handler                             1461        350.02699999  0.2395804243
tramp-send-command                                     227         179.63400000  0.7913392070
tramp-send-command-and-check                           205         177.77600000  0.8672000000
tramp-wait-for-regexp                                  227         176.47800000  0.7774361233
tramp-wait-for-output                                  226         176.40000000  0.7805309734
tramp-barf-unless-okay                                 18          133.46699999  7.4148333333
tramp-handle-insert-file-contents                      3           132.046       44.015333333
tramp-handle-file-local-copy                           3           131.281       43.760333333
tramp-accept-process-output                            2375        112.95100000  0.0475583157

So, actual file transfer takes 132 sec, about 1/3 of total time. Why does it spend so much time in tramp-sh-file-name-handler? I tried to advice a function tramp-sh-file-name-handler to store and return cached results but it does not work, probably this function has some side effects.

Any ideas how to improve tramp performance? (I use emacs 23.1 under WindowsXP)

Answer 1

I've found that fuse-ssh is far better than tramp mode, if you can set it up that way.