FTP Transactions Slow

Hi,
I work for a web hosting company that has a few LAMP boxes. I noticed recently that the FTP on our system is significantly slower in some ways than FTP on another site I work on.

I don't mean download/upload speed or connection speed. I'm talking about the speed of the FTP commands themselves. On this external site they seem blindingly fast, while on ours its at least half as fast if not slower.

It's not that big of a deal, as this is only an issue when I'm working with a large number of small files, but I was wondering if there is any settings I could look at to improve the performance of our systems.

The server is pure-ftp and my client is WSFTP Pro. Any ideas would be much appreciated.