rsync 2.6.0 causing incredible load on Linux 2.4.x?

[Clint Byrum]

Hi everyone. Has anyone experienced rsync 2.6.0 causing huge amounts of
system load? Especially on Linux 2.4?

We recently upgraded our "push" machine to rsync 2.6.0 and the next push
that went out (rsyncing about 3GB of data to 15 servers sequentially
over gigabit ethernet) caused the box to hit 110.59. We only know the
load because snmpd was still working, but nothing else in userspace was.

We couldn't see if rsync was causing this.. but upon reboot we regressed
to 2.5.7 (the rpm install version from RH8.0), and there was no more
load problem. We do know that the files did get updated on 2 of the 15
servers, though not completely on the second one.

Its entirely possible that this was something else.. but the box had
never locked up like this, and it happened precisely after rsync was
upgraded. I haven't been able to reproduce it in our test environment,
and I'm not too keen on taking the box down again just to confirm this.
However, I wouldn't mind doing so if it meant fixing a major bug in
rsync. We love rsync here and would be served quite well by the new
from_list option.

Oh, and one other thing... whats up with this:

-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root      1294978 Jan 30 12:54 /usr/local/rsync-2.6.0/bin/rsync
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root       216785 Dec  3 20:42 /usr/bin/rsync

Has rsync really added 5 times as many features? More error checking?
Just curious really. They're both stripped binaries in case thats what
you were thinking. ;)

Some maybe helpful info:

Network: HP2824 24 port gigE switch

Push Server:
Software: RedHat Linux 8.0 - Kernel 2.4.20-28.8, ext3 fs, rsync 2.6.0
Hardware: P4 2.2Ghz, i850 chipset, 1GB DDR RAM, 4xSCSI 10krpm-U160
drives in software RAID10. Intel e1000 32-bit NIC.

Receiving Servers:
Software: RH8.0, various kernels, ext3 fs, rsync 2.5.7
Hardware: ranging from dual p3-800's to dual P4-3.0Ghz, 1GB RAM - 4GB
RAM. Some IDE, some SCSI disks in RAID10, RAID0, or RAID1 depending on
the box. Some gigE, some 100Mbit.