---
title: "Slow connections with ProFTPD"
kind: article
slug: slow-connections-with-proftpd
created_at: 2007-05-29
tags:
  - General
  - Features
  - Linux
  - Ubuntu
---

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:
<pre lang="text">IdentLookups off</pre>
Restart ProFTPD and you'll have a fast FTP connection to enjoy!