Arn,

There is a way to transfer a directory as a single tar-stream, like this:

1. tar up source directory prior to transfer
2. transfer the tar-stream
3. untar the archive on the destination

without manual taring/untaring on the client and the server.

We implemented this for a community that uses GridFTP heavily for transfers
of 42GB sized directories containing 130.000 rather small files in a nested
directory structure.
It works very reliable this way.
The only downside I know is that you cannot use any of the advanced
features of GridFTP then, like parallelism: The tar-stream transfers
became unreliable.

To do this you must enable the popen driver in GridFTP.
I recommend the latest server from 5.0.0 plus a GridFTP patch.

For the taring on the client-side you can use globus-url-copy using certain
flags. We built on top of the jglobus Java API to get it running for Java
clients.

I could provide more details and instructions if you are interested in this
approach.

Martin

Arn wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> We've set up GridFTP (4.2.1) on several nodes across our WAN (2 sites)
> using the quickstart documentation.
> 
> We are not seeing any issues while transferring large files but when
> we do a batch transfer (globus-url-copy) with lots of small files
> (LOSF) then we have problems.
> The debug/verbose output is the following :
> ----------------------------------------------------
> 
> error transferring:
> globus_ftp_client: the server responded with an error
> 500 500-Command failed. : globus_l_gfs_file_open failed.
> 500-globus_xio: Unable to open file /path/to/data/losf/small0aAEq8QsYSCJ
> 500-globus_xio: System error in open: Permission denied
> 500-globus_xio: A system call failed: Permission denied
> 500 End.
> 
> error: There was an error with one or more transfers.
> ---------------------------------------------------
> 
> Note, that this error is intermittent as the same transfer works sometimes.
> 
> We would appreciate some advice info on what could be the problem and
> also how to investigate further.
> 
> Thanks
> Arn

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