Which is faster, and why: transferring several small files or few large files?

It is faster to transfer a single large file instead of lots of little files because of the overhead of negotiating the transfer. The negotiation is done for each file, so transferring a single file it needs to be done once, transferring n files means it needs to be done n times.

You will save yourself a lot of time if you zip first before the transfer.

Jon Cahill is very correct, a single file will be faster. However it's worth keeping in mind that if there is any instability in the connection, individual files (or medium-sized groups in zip files) may be better, because if the transfer fails you'll have to start all over again, whereas with multiple files you will just have to re-do the last file started

Lots of little files will also be more expensive to write to the file system than a single large file. It needs to do things like:

• Check the file name is unique
• Write out the file table entry

As you get more and more files in a directory this can become quite costly. And each of these steps can add latency to the copy process and slow the whole thing down.