scp from AWS EC2 takes very long time

I am trying to scp a directory from my EC2 instance. I am using the following command:

scp -i "keyPair.pem" -r ubuntu@ec2.....com:~/targetDirectory ./

It seems like it is working and I see initially names of files being copied, but then I see the following output for a very long time (cancelled the operation after 5 minutes of this):

343f1933ac9543d7a1f01485c05240da92a59b          100%  233     0.2KB/s   00:00
7179795a244d484c59cdfb4279173cbbea8fc9          100%  229     0.2KB/s   00:00
85df1721798f6580e5612bc0725d3fac4afbd9          100% 1852     1.8KB/s   00:00
e98e3f2a32409d91a00986349c66a031e288d2          100%  437     0.4KB/s   00:00
d1b67475405284e3dac312f92ade101571329f          100%  867     0.9KB/s   00:00
64ea541f6892f18f1f36ce8369109ae3d949c3          100%  650     0.6KB/s   00:00
b2fb3f4d7a4c54a2defb35bfdd33ca6aaa46f2          100%  487     0.5KB/s   00:00
4101f13526772891c89b9c81feb8c89b8d08a3          100%  346     0.3KB/s   00:00
612c85081563ca33523e691df71c3d62aaf067          100%  531     0.5KB/s   00:00
4fd27b541733586269f71b24bee6c695693205          100%  357     0.4KB/s   00:00
ee8b464484d1d9292340545cab02c5f777e1a6          100% 1269     1.2KB/s   00:00

Does anyone if I'm doing anything wrong/what's going on?

Thanks!

Solution

Look at the speed of transfer. The throughput is very low 200 bytes/sec to 500 bytes/sec. Check your network connection. Is there some throttling enabled? Even then I have never seen such a low low transfer speed.

Use scp -v to show the progress. It is likely the next file being transferred is big and takes a long time (> 5 mins) to download it.