I run ProFTPD on both of my development machines - one is a Mandrake Linux 10.1 box and one is Fedora Core 5. The FC5 machine was recently setup as I needed a devoted PHP5 development machine, but the ftp server was taking up to three seconds per directory to perform an action. I needed to transfer some client code and it took about ten minutes just scan through all of the directories - this was completely unaccpetable.

I was curious as to what the differences were between the two machines - one worked very quickly and one did not. After a bit of a searching I discovered a few tweaks that solved all of the problems:

Adding the following to the config file really sped up the login process:

[html]
IdentLookups off
UseReverseDNS off

[/html]

However, my directory listings were still running slowly. When I added:

[html]

AllowOverride off

[/html]

To the global config file, it told ProFTPD to stop looking for an .ftpaccess file in every single directory.

Once I restarted the server, things were blazing along. All it took were a few minor changes to be back in business!