tftp vs ftp

In the networking field transferring files to or from networking equipment wasn’t as common as it is now. I suspect this is largely due to many factors like vendors updating their software to meet the ever challenging security concerns and clients interest in logs that may reside on the unit.
A good example was when I was troubleshooting a problem with a Cisco router and we needed to download the crashlog for Cisco TAC. I was a bit surprised when my client was not familiar with, or comfortable with downloading a file from their router. In another situation, a client wanted me to figure out why his tftp was slow or failing when uploading a Cisco IOS to his router. To cut to the chase, I used ftp and the upload finished in a fraction of the time. The client misunderstood and thought I was showing them a bug, but I explained that tftp is UDP based and not too forgiving where ftp is TCP based and more likely to work where tftp struggles.
I thought it would be helpful to duplicate the tftp performance issue with a different perspective. I used a WAN emulator from Apposite to demonstrate the differences and documented what is used for this lab, my methodology and an example of items that I document when performing an application baseline.
The two key point to take away from this is:
• It doesn’t take that much time to perform a high level comparison between two applications.
• When tftp is taking too long, or not completing, you might want to try ftp.