[elempe]

Hello!
I'm quite new to KODI, but I'm trying to learn fast and get it as comfortable for everyday use as possible.

Setup: 
windows-based PC, connected to FHD TV, the PC is a media player, nothing more. 
Media are located on other Linux server connected through VPN. Connection speed is not very fast but it is enough for most media - somewhat of 150Mbit/s if connecting via sftp. 
To be more precise about PC/media player:
Windows 10 22H2
Kodi 20.2
with sftp add-on installed.  

What I am facing is that when streaming (playing video from sftp location) the connection speed in the background never exceeds 10Mbit/s, video stops to buffer then plays a little and stops again, but never more than 10Mbit/s. Actually all the time bit less than 10 - it looks like a software-limited traffic pattern. 
I'm certain that connection can handle at least 10 times faster, as it has been tested numerous times, the 150Mbit/s is a normal single-thread download. Even in parallel with Kodi close to that speed can be achieved.
I don't mind if Kodi takes all the bandwidth of the system as its only purpose is media player.

I have played around with C:\Users\<myuser>\AppData\Roaming\Kodi\userdata\advancedsettings.xml, currently it is like this:

Code:


<advancedsettings>
  <cache>
    <buffermode>1</buffermode>
    <memorysize>209715200</memorysize>
    <readfactor>60000</readfactor>
  </cache>
</advancedsettings>


I don't notice any changes at least the download speed doesn't change at all.
Any ideas on how to increase download speed for video play/stream over sftp will be appreciated.
Thanks! Cheers! 

[Prof Yaffle]

Assuming you've not unintentionally installed a network card from the mid-1990s, I'd probably raise an accusing eyebrow at SFTP. It's not designed for high-speed streaming, and the overheads of acknowledging, retrying, encrypting and the like might well be giving you that bottleneck.

If you've got an open tunnel between your media player PC and what I presume is a remote server, could you not simply map locations over SMB or NFS instead? 

As a diagnostic, you could use Kodi's file browser to navigate to the remote server over whatever protocol, and use that to copy a source file to local storage. If that works, then it strongly suggests an issue with your chosen streaming protocol.

[elempe]

Yes, I am aware it is not an optimal setup, as ssh does encryption over an encrypted channel.
On the other hand, there are no problems with connection speed itself, as any other tool on the Windows PC can achieve ten times more than KODI does. So it leads to the conclusion that the problem is with KODI or its virtual FS add-on. 

At the moment I don't want to install/enable any other file transfer service on the Linux machine, there are quite a few reasons, but at the moment it is not important, the goal is to get KODI (or its add-on) to utilize all available speed.