in reply to SFTP is too slow...

Since the latest release of Net::SFTP::Foreign is marked "Development" (in big red letters!), you might wanna try contacting the author or using the bug reporting mechanism on CPAN as well. Have you tried an older, non-development release?

That said, I would recommend checking that the module is using the same defaults as the binary. Perhaps some combination of compression, data encryption and/or cipher is biting you.

non-Perl: Andy Ford