Better handling of small file transfers

Transferring a bunch of small files in batch over FTP / SFTP is pretty awful. It doesn't appear to have to do with connection speed, it seems to be about the protocol overhead of transferring a single file. Is it possible to do something such as pipe the files through the 'tar' command or similar in order to transfer bulk groups of small files faster?

I'm not aware or any such method. Using tar won't do, as you have no way to tar/untar files on the remote side.

I don't imagine tar's format would be terribly complicated to implement directly, though... I mean, it doesn't even include any compression. Anyway, thanks; at least I know I wasn't missing something :)

myndzi wrote:

I don't imagine tar's format would be terribly complicated to implement directly, though... I mean, it doesn't even include any compression. Anyway, thanks; at least I know I wasn't missing something :)

Again, how do you image WinSCP would untar the file on the remote server? That's not about implementing TAR format, that's about running a code on the server.