Rsync 2.4.6 and Hammerd CPU's

[Sandy Ganz]

Hello -

I'm running Redhat 7.1 Rsync 2.4.6 and am having some problems with the
CPU's getting swammped. What we have is basically an 3 boxes, 1 machine (the
factory) is a where applications store the images that eventually are used
for the site, then the other 2 are the webservers that the have copy of the
images. The person who set the machines up used rsync to move any new images
from the 'factory box' to both of the webserver boxes. The amount of images
are huge on all boxes (close to a million). Typically a few thousands images
is all that rsync must move. The directory structure where the images live
are broken down into a shallow and somewhat wide tree with a few thousand
images in each directory

The problem...

When rsync seems to to build the list of files, seems OK, uses about 20meg
of ram (not swaping either). Then  when the files start to be moved (all
around 2-4k) the cpu's (4x 500 xeon) all run 100% and kill any Http trafic
that need also to be running on the box. This would be ok if on the Source
factory box, but not on the web servers. The interesting thing is that is
does not matter if I run Rsync on the Factory or the Webservers it only ever
pegs the CPU's on the web servers.

I tried the throttle on bandwidth [at 256], was ng, as that might be for
file transfers of a larger size. This is lots of small .jpg images.

Any ideas on how to keep rsync from using all the cpu on the webservers? I
got tossed this problem as I was a warm body, but am not a linux master so
might be I got stuck with some bad use of rsync.

Also it seems odd that both the source and dest machings use a huge amount
of ram, I would expect only one to need to do the file compair. Does this
sound wrong?

Thanks for any help you can offer

Sandy