title: How to improve the Performance of FtpWebRequest?
body: <p>I have an application written in .NET 3.5 that uses FTP to upload/download files from a server. The app works fine but there are performance issues:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>It takes a lot of time to make connection to the FTP server. The FTP server is on a different network and has Windows 2003 Server (IIS FTP). When multiple files are queued for upload, the change from one file to another creates a new connection using FTPWebRequest and it takes a lot of time (around 8-10 seconds).</p></li>
  <li><p>Is is possible to re-use the connection? I am not very sure about the KeepAlive property. Which connections are kept alive and reused.</p></li>
  <li><p>The IIS-FTP on Windows Server 2003 does not support SSL so anyone can easily see the username/password through a packet sniffer such as WireShark. I found that windows Server 2008 supports SSL over FTP in its new version if IIS 7.0.</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>I basically want to improve the upload/download performance of my application. Any ideas will be appreciated.</p>
  
  <p>** Please note that 3 is not an issue but I would like people to have comments on it</p>