Filelist caching

[Andrew J. Schorr]

Hi Rogier,

> I've noticed every time someone does an rsync-request on my ftp-site
> (which also provides rsync as mirror method), rsyncd creates a filelist.
> This is a quite IO and CPU intensive procedure, especially for things
> mirrors like FreeBSD with lots of little files.
> 
> I was wondering... is there a way to cache that filelist? Our mirrors
> are updated once, or twice a day, it could speed up downloads when I
> create a filelist everytime we've mirrored others.

Please take a look at the --files-from feature that is now in the CVS tree,
courtesy of Wayne Davison.  That should do what you want.  It allows you to
create a set list of files and save rsync the work of scanning the directory
tree each time.  Of course, rsync still creates a filelist, but it doesn't
have to recurse over the directory tree, so it should be much faster.

-Andy