large number of TX packets on ftp

[Peter Stein]

ifconfig is reporting no errors or overruns on ftp of a large file (67 Meg),
but is showing a large number of TX packets. The number always hovers around 
38% of RX, so for 49000 RX packets ifconfig reports about 18000 TX packets.

What's going on? Am I not taking into account how the ftp implementation works
or is there something seriously wrong here? Shouldn't the receiving end of a
ftp session only attempt to send something if a problem occurs?

I guess the next thing to try is to enable debugging on ftpd and ftp itself
and if that doesn't reveal anything start looking at source code, but i hope
it won't come to that.

Peter Stein