How can I fix slow LocalSend transfer speeds?

Mac
1

LocalSend transfer speed is much slower than expected on my home network. Sending files between my devices starts normally, but the speed drops and large transfers take far too long to finish. I need help figuring out whether this is caused by Wi-Fi settings, firewall issues, device limits, or a LocalSend configuration problem.

2

Why the speed looks wrong

I’d check the units first. A lot of people mix up MB/s and Mbps, and the gap is big. If your client shows 500 to 800 kB/s, you’re only sitting around 6 to 7 Mbps, which is a lot lower than the 50+ Mbps people keep posting.

If others are pulling decent numbers and yours stays stuck, something on your side or in the route is dragging it down. The usual stuff I’d look at:

  1. The drive is the bottleneck, especially an older HDD writing lots of small pieces
  2. VPN traffic overhead, or antivirus scanning every chunk as it lands
  3. The torrent itself has weak seeders, slow peers, or too much load
  4. Your ISP is shaping torrent traffic
  5. The listening port isn’t set up right, so peer connectivity is bad
  6. Wi-Fi is dropping packets or fluctuating, while wired would stay steady

Stuff I would test first

Try a different torrent or even a normal download before changing random settings. If every transfer is slow, I’d blame the PC, phone, router, or network setup. If one torrent crawls and another moves fine, the swarm is the problem.

These are the checks worth doing:

  1. Turn on encryption in the client and see if speeds climb
  2. Set upload to a reasonable cap instead of leaving it wide open
  3. Switch from Wi-Fi to Ethernet
  4. Watch disk usage during the transfer and see if it pegs at 100%
  5. Confirm the client port is open and reachable

I’ve seen upload saturation wreck download speed more than once. Same with cheap laptop drives. Looks like a network issue at first, then you open Task Manager and the disk is flatlining. Kinda annoying, but easy to miss.

About people claiming 50 Mbps

A lot of those posts come from people on fiber, fast SSDs, wired setups, or private trackers where the seeding is strong and stable. Public torrents are messy. One swarm flies, the next one limps along all night. So I would not treat somebody else’s screenshot like a baseline for your setup.

500 to 800 kB/s is slow if your connection is decent, sure. Still, I wouldn’t jump straight to “something’s broken.” More often I’ve seen a bad config, weak peers, Wi-Fi issues, or ISP interference. Sometimes it’s two of those at once, which is fun in the worst way.

If the problem is file transfer, not torrenting

I ran into this on macOS with Android transfers. The default MTP method felt old and flaky, especially on larger files. Speeds would dip, freeze, then crawl. Switching tools helped more than I expected.

One option people keep having decent luck with is MacDroid. It tends to handle newer Android devices better than the old Android File Transfer app, and large transfers usually go smoother.

Other tools people try:

  1. LocalSend for transfers over your local network
  2. OpenMTP
  3. AirDroid
  4. SMB or regular network sharing when both devices are on the same LAN

In my expereince, changing the transfer method fixes the speed issue faster than tweaking the same broken setup for an hour. If the default path is bad, move off it and test again.

5 Likes
3

I’d check LocalSend itself before chasing router ghosts.

First, test with one large file, like a 2 to 10 GB video. Small files tank speed because file indexing and write overhead eat time. If a single big file runs fast and a folder of 20,000 photos crawls, LocalSend is fine. Your file mix is the issue.

Second, watch CPU on both devices during the transfer. LocalSend does local encryption and app-layer processing. Older phones, cheap tablets, and low-power laptops hit a wall fast. If one device sits near 80 to 100 percent CPU, that’s your bottlneck.

Third, disable battery saver and performance throttling on phones and laptops. I’ve seen Android drop Wi-Fi throughput hard once the screen turns off. Keep both devices awake for the test.

Fourth, try 5 GHz or 6 GHz Wi-Fi only, or move both devices closer to the access point. I disagree a bit with @mikeappsreviewer on wired being the first move for everyone. For LocalSend, bad band steering is often the bigger problem. One device ends up stuck on 2.4 GHz and your speed falls off a cliff.

A few more checks:

  1. Make sure both devices are on the same AP, not one on a mesh node upstairs and one on the main router.
  2. Turn off client isolation, guest mode, or AP isolation in router settings.
  3. Test another local tool, like SMB share or iperf3. If those are slow too, LocalSend is not the cause.
  4. Check free storage. Phones slow down a lot when storage is near full.
  5. If this is Android to Mac, MacDroid is worth trying. MTP and some network workflows on macOS get flaky, and MacDroid tends to be more stable for large file moves.

If you post device models, file type, Wi-Fi band, and speeds in MB/s, people here will narrow it down fast.

4

One thing I’d add to what @mikeappsreviewer and @byteguru said: check whether your router is doing weird “helpful” stuff to local traffic. QoS, Smart Connect, traffic shaping, WPA3 transition mode, mesh roaming assist, all that junk can absolutely wreck LAN transfer consistency even when internet speed tests look fine. LocalSend depends on a clean local path, not your ISP speed.

What I’d test:

  1. Reboot router/AP and both devices. Boring, but it fixes stale Wi-Fi sessions more often than people admit.
  2. Temporarily disable QoS / bandwidth control / gaming mode.
  3. If you use a mesh, force both devices onto the same node. Mesh backhaul can be the hidden bottlneck.
  4. Compare LocalSend speed with a plain SMB copy. If SMB is also bad, stop blaming LocalSend.
  5. Check if the destination device is thermal throttling. Phones get hot, then performance falls off a cliff.
  6. Try sending to internal storage, not SD card or external USB storage. Those are often slooow.
  7. On Windows, check if the network profile is Public instead of Private. Sometimes local discovery and transfer behavior gets funky.

I slightly disagree with the “it’s probably just file mix” angle because if speed starts high then steadily collapses, that often smells like heat, throttling, storage cache exhaustion, or router behavior, not just lots of small files.

If this is Android to Mac and LocalSend keeps being flaky, MacDroid is honestly worth a shot. MacDroid tends to be more stable for large Android file transfers on macOS than fighting with random transfer methods for an hour.

Also post the actual speeds in MB/s, device models, and whether the drop happens at the same point every time. That detail matters alot.