binary copies vs ascii copies

[Wayne Davison]

On Mon, Aug 11, 2003 at 01:59:22PM -0500, Carniado Rodr?guez Claudia wrote:
> I have copied a binary file whose size is about 100 MB using rsync and
> I noticed that it takes a lot of time.  The same size with a text file
> wasted really much less time.

As J.W. mentioned, rsync doesn't differentiate between text and binary
files, so the difference has to be coming from somewhere else.  For
instance, if the network connection is compressed (or if you have
compression turned on in the rsync or ssh layer), the text file could
easily transfer much faster due to that (since text compresses more than
binary data).  Alternately, if both are incremental updates, a text file
is often more similar to the latest version, and thus updates with less
data sent (since more of it matches).  E.g., a compressed file might
have no shared data between the old and new version, so it has to be
sent again in total.

..wayne..