My shiny new VPS, which is running Ubuntu Linux, uses ProFTPD for FTP access. Today I noticed that setting up the connection takes about 5 to 10 seconds. This is really annoying when editing files through FTP.
So, I investigated and found that by default ProFTPD tries to revolve the hostname of the client in order to put that in the logs instead of a plain IP address. This lookup can take quite some time, let’s say 5 to 10 seconds, especially when the look up fails and you have to wait on a time-out.
It’s easy to stop ProFTPD from behaving like this by adding the following line to your proftpd.conf in /etc/proftpd:
IdentLookups off
Restart ProFTPD and you’ll have a fast FTP connection to enjoy!