I was scp'ing a 2MB file to my home computer over a DSL line and just happened to run top at the same time. I immediately noticed this line: 13864 root 1 30 0 2884K 1744K run 0:38 42.00% sshd2 It appears that scp'ing a file over a slow connection causes the process to suck up a huge number of resources. There's most likely no usleep() somewhere it's needed. A couple scp's over slow connections could severely degrade the boxes performance. This test was performed on a Solaris 8_x86 machine.
