Nautilus vs. command line scp

[Saad Shakhshir]

I've noticed some strange behavior when connecting to a server through
nautilus and downloading files as opposed to running scp straight from the
command line.  I ran several tests that involved downloading a large file
from a remote server both through the nautilus GUI and from the command
line.  This confirmed my suspicions which are highlighted in the below
linked screenshots.

The download behavior of nautilus is extremely erratic with download speeds
continually spiking from zero to 160kb/s and then back to zero.  When
comparing the nautilus graph to the scp graph, the difference is
incredible.  Commandline scp is nearly impeccably smoothe, with few but very
regular spikes.  These tests were run at several different times of the day
and continued to produce similar results.

Does anyone have working knowledge of the nautilus code that might have an
idea as to what is going on here?  Note that in terms of average speed they
were both roughly the same (commandline scp was slightly faster on average).

nautilus: http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/3236/nautilusqq6.png
scp: http://img237.imageshack.us/img237/5474/scplr0.png

-SS-
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