No one seems to have any clue how to make downloads faster. Nothing I do based on suggestions here have any effect.

Think I will try my luck with FileZilla

@userss: WinSCP supports "multithreaded" transfers too.
It just does not use it by default.
See https://winscp.net/eng/docs/transfer_queue

I found that FileZilla is much faster than winscp, with download 300000+ files in about 150GB+. The FileZilla use about an hour but winscp may use 4 hours+ to finished (newer files only download). WinSCP spends much of the time to reconnect and skip files that failed to download or connection dropped. It is easily broken connection while FileZilla will have multithread downloading that cause it finished the job much faster. However, WinSCP can scripting that totally win the FileZilla. I use WinSCP for unattended downloading because I can script it. I love WinSCP and I hope it will have multithread download features or faster download speed in the future.

FileZilla is definitely quick but often forgets to transfer a lot of files, folders and fields within folders.
And that's why with the way WinSCP accurately sync's files, at least I know I'm not going to get shorted a bunch of files that should have copied and forgot about completely, not just in the failed section.
I wish it was faster, but I bet the server is where most of the issues lie.

FileZilla is not faster than WinSCP in general

Ha! This is so clearly wrong. There are hundreds of confirmed reports here and elsewhere. After testing on network configurations across the world I know with absolute certainty that FileZilla is way faster than WinSCP, about three times faster for plain FTP uploads. I understand you focus on other things. That's fine, but don't pretend WinSCP is as fast as FileZilla 'in general' because it plainly, provably, isn't close.

WinSCP is very good, but very slow. For now we'll have to continue using FileZilla for transferring any remotely significant amounts of data (above 20Mb or a few hundred files, say) and use WinSCP for it's scripting. It's just a shame the lead developer of FileZilla is too proud to implement auto-upload on save, and you are too proud to admit WinSCP is slow.

FileZilla is not faster than WinSCP in general. We have optimized WinSCP for networks configuration we have available. But that are network configurations, where WinSCP does not perform that well, but it's hard for us to solve that obviously.

Though anyway, FileZilla author focuses on performance primarily indeed, at expense of other features. With WinSCP we focus on other features relatively more. The choice is yours.

I know it's been asked for years, but why is WinSCP so slow compared to Filezilla for file transfers? I see many reports but no solution. Using the latest WinSCP and Filezilla, uploading Wordpress (1508 files, 28Mb) over Port 21 (unencrypted) we see...

Filezilla: 59 seconds
WinSCP: 2 min 38 seconds

I can't work with Filezilla as it misses basic functions (auto-upload on save). Other FTP programs we've tested can be as slow as WinSCP, so does anyone know how FileZilla manages to achieve so much better transfer speeds?