Minbox - a faster workflow for sending files

I misread the title as faster sending, rather than faster workflow. For dropbox we just use shared folders which work no matter what else is going on (network connectivity, machines sleeping, reboots etc).

I'd be overjoyed if someone could figure out faster sending. My DSL maxes out at 100 kbytes/sec upstream. Sending someone something like a mongodb dump involves a long wait while I locally compress it, and an even longer wait while it gets uploaded. I'd gladly have all 4 cores (plus another 4 hyperthreaded) plus 32GB of RAM dedicated to getting the files uploaded quicker. In theory some of the compression tools can do this, but some aren't multithreaded, or require a lot of research to figure out workable command line options and even then they consider 4GB to be an outrageous amount of memory. Often you have to wait for the compression to finish before you can even start the sending.

The video is probably gonna be offputting for some people but it's hilarious. I actually laughed out loud at it.

While I understand it technically I feel like the video is incredibly misleading. It's demonstrating time-to-share a link which (at some point) will contain a file. It's not demonstrating time-to-upload a file like the video suggests by comparing directly against dropbox.

You can! Minbox does that too... AND there's a global keyboard shortcut to compose a new message (CMD+Option+N).

Perhaps you should have a look at pigz, a multi-threaded implementation of gzip. It uses the same flags as gzip, so -# specifies speed (-1 runs the fastest with the least compression ... -9 runs the slowest with the best compression), and by default it spawns as many processes as you have processors. I've never done any formal benchmarks, so I'm not qualified to speak as to its efficiency, however.

Based on your late-90's upload rate (and assuming you're working with large files that compress nicely), I'd say the more time you spend on compression, the less overall time you're looking at. That 100kb/s (theoretical) limit is really the first bottleneck you should be fixing, though.

[edit]: I completely misread that as kilobits/s. Point still stands minus the 90's bit.