When I scp or rsync a file several MBs from host Linux machine to guest Linux machine (both CentOS), the transfer starts at several hundred KB/s but slows down pretty quickly until it eventually "stalls". I've found a strange solution which is that if the guest machine pings the host at intervals then it keeps the connection from stalling (with a rate of about 10 to 20 KB/s). pinging works fine, but why does secure transfer have problems with maintaining a stable connection when transfering a single decent sized file?

I've tried rebooting the machine to no avail :-(

scp command used: $scp somefile.gz user@10.0.2.15:/directory_path/

rsync command used: $rsync -av somefile.gz --rsh=ssh user@10.0.2.15:/directory_path/

thank you,

Atoosah