Magic Wormhole: get things from one computer to another, safely

I've used this for years when passing large files between systems in weird network environments, it's almost always flawless.

For some more exotic testing, I was able to run my own magic wormhole relay[1], which let me tweak some things for faster/more reliable huge file copies. I still hate how often Google Drive will fall over when you throw a 10s-of-GB file at it.

[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/my-own-magic-wormhole...

> For some more exotic testing, I was able to run my own magic wormhole relay[1], which let me tweak some things for faster/more reliable huge file copies.

The lack of improvement in these tools is pretty devastating. There was a flurry of activity around PAKEs like 6 years ago now, but we're still missing:

* reliable hole punching so you don't need a slow relay server

* multiple simultaneous TCP streams (or a carefully designed UDP protocol) to get large amounts of data through long fat pipes quickly

Last time I tried using a Wormhole to transmit a large amount of data, I was limited to 20 MB/sec thanks to the bandwidth-delay product. I ended up using plain old http, with aria2c and multiple streams I maxed out a 1 Gbps line.

IMO there's no reason why PAKE tools shouldn't have completely displaced over-complicated stuff like Globus (proprietary) for long distance transfer of huge data, but here we are stuck in the past.

As a protocol tcp should be able to utilize a long fat pipe with a large enough receive window. You might want to check what window scaling factor is used and look for a tunable. I accept that some implementations may have limits beyond the protocol level. And even low levels of packet loss can severely affect throughput of a single stream.

A bigger reason you want multiple streams is because most network providers use a stream identifier like the 5-tuple hash to spread traffic, and support single-stream bandwidth much lower than whatever aggregate they may advertise.