I have been playing around with Python's FTP library and am starting to think that it is too slow as compared to using a script file in DOS?  I run sessions where I download thousands of data files  (I think I have over 8 million right now).  My observation is that the download process seems to take five to ten times as long in Python than it does as compared to using the ftp commands in the DOS shell.
Since I don't want anyone to fix my code I have not included any.  I am more interested in understanding if my observation is valid or if I need to tinker more with the arguments.
FTPlib may not be the cleanest Python API, I don't think it so bad that it run ten times slower than a DOS shell script.
Unless you do not provide any code to compare, e.g you shell and you python snippet to batch dl 5000 files, I can't see how we can help you.
Python's FTPLib too slow?