rsync seems to hang when --delete option is used.

[Wayne Davison]

On Thu, Dec 09, 2004 at 04:02:05PM -0500, Tony Shum wrote:
> When I use --delete option, it seems to hang for over 8 hours on 4.5Gb 
> of total data.

The --delete option causes rsync to read the local hierarchy, and
construct a list of files to compare with the remote file list.  If it
is hanging, I'd imagine that there is some kind of a read problem on the
local system -- perhaps an NFS mount is down or something.  I can also
imagine that a recursive mount of a file system (e.g. a "bind" type of
mount) could cause rsync to loop back on itself creating the local file
list, but that would cause rsync to bloat until it ran out of memory.

Some suggestions for you:  attach to the hung rsync with a debugger and
see where it is hung -- you should be able to see what file/directory it
is working on reading, and that should help you to narrow down the
problem.  Alternately, run run rsync using a system-call tracer to see
what it was doing prior to the hang (see the issues page on the rsync
web site for how to get a remote rsync to run under the strace/truss
program).

..wayne..