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Listing of a directory with more than 20000 files via FTP takes a long time

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Marc López
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Applicable to:

  • Plesk for Linux

Symptoms

  • When listing a directory with more than 20000 files in it via FTP, it takes more than 2 minutes to complete.

  • ProFTPd version 1.3.6 is installed:

    # proftpd -v
    ProFTPD Version 1.3.6

 

Possible consequences

  • High CPU usage 100% maybe observed on the server.

Cause

This is a ProFTPd bug 4360: Slow listing for a directory with 20000 files.

The issue is also registered as a Plesk bug with ID PPPM-9486, which will be fixed in one of the future product updates.

Resolution

As a workaround, it's possible to downgrade ProFTPd as follows:

  1. Download 1.3.5d package here:

    # wget http://autoinstall.plesk.com/PSA_17.5.3/extras-rpm-CentOS-7-x86_64/opt/hosting/proftpd/psa-proftpd-1.3.5d-cos7.build1705170314.14.x86_64.rpm

    Note: The versions in the example above, are Plesk 17.5 and CentOS 7. Select the version according to the specific needs on the affected server.

  2. Downgrade:

    # yum downgrade psa-proftpd-1.3.5d-cos7.build1705170314.14.x86_64.rpm

  3. Add ProFTPd to exclusions for upgrade: exclude=psa-proftpd-1.3.6* to /etc/yum.conf

Note: This won't cause any issues because 1.3.5d satisfies the requirements of dependencies

Comments

6 comments

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  • Avatar
    Dani Mora

    Is there any way to downgrade the ftpversion to a previous one? I have some servers with lots of users doing LIST comands with a few hundrs of files per user and the CPU is super high.

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  • Avatar
    Konstantin Annikov

    Hello, 

    Yes, downgrade is possible. Older package for your OS could be found here:

    https://pkgs.org/download/proftpd

    There are several guides available on the web on how to downgrade package in rpm- or deb-based OSes. The only thing that should be done is to backing up configuration files: 

    /etc/xinetd.d/ftp_psa
    /etc/proftpd.conf
    /etc/proftpd.include

    However such procedure has not been tested in Plesk environment and that is why I could not recommend one or another way of package downgrading. 

     

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  • Avatar
    Dani Mora

    Hi Konstantin,

    The current package installed in plesk says "This package is built for PLESK with our own mod_quota patch." I'm afraid that if I install a package directly from pckgs.org I might lose some functionality or that plesk will overwrite it in the next update. 

    Is there any way to find and install the older package from the Plesk source? Or do you think that is the same?

    Name        : psa-proftpd
Version     : 1.3.6
Release     : cos7.build1708180220.17
    This package is built for PLESK with our own mod_quota patch.
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  • Avatar
    Konstantin Annikov

    Hello,

    I have double checked this question and can confirm that there is no possibility to downgrade psa-proftpd package as there are dependencies on plesk-web-hosting package. And we do not recommend you to do such downgrade because slow directory listing is caused by additional security checks which provide your server with better security.

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  • Avatar
    Dani Mora

    Great! I guess we will have to wait until the ProFTPd bug 4360 is resolved

    My two cents are that is not just the case with 20.000 files, a bunch of users with directory listings of 500 items can also bring the server almost down :(

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  • Avatar
    Konstantin Annikov

    @Dani Mora

    I also hope that proftpd will fix that soon. 
    You can also split folders with large amount of files to several sub-folders until the fix become available. 

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