Panic recently released a new major version of Transmit, over five years since version 3.0 was released. As far as I am concerned, Transmit is one of the best FTP clients for OS X; I’ve been using it for the last five years. Because of that length of time, a paid upgrade to version 4.0 is quite reasonable ($30 for five years of software usage is pretty good value, after all). But is the upgrade worth it? Transmit 3 is a solid FTP client, supporting FTP, FTP with SSL, SFTP, WebDav, and Amazon S3.
One of the features that Transmit 4 (T4 from this point forward) boasts over previous versions is a serious speed increase. It claims that listing 30,000 remote files is 4x faster, that downloading 30,000 small files is 18x faster, deleting 30,000 small files is 2.25x faster, and uploading 15,000 small files is 25x faster. Those are impressive speed gains. Of course, how many people will be uploading or downloading thousands of small files at one time?
Testing the speed gains of T4
Uploading a 14MB zip archive to my Web host using SFTP took the same amount of time as previous versions, so the speed gains are in how Transmit handles and queues FTP commands. Looking in the T4 preferences, there is a Transfers section where you can throttle upload and download speeds and specify the number of transfers done simultaneously (five, by default). With Transmit 3 (T3) you can tell it to queue files to transfer, and the default there is two simultaneous transfers.
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Originally Posted by anon
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