rsync 2.6.0 causing incredible load on Linux 2.4.x?

[jw schultz]

On Mon, Feb 02, 2004 at 02:01:15PM -0800, Clint Byrum wrote:
> 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.

There aren't too many things that would account for this.
The only one i can think of is an exclude pattern that
causes pathalogical behavior with the new pattern matching
code.  2.6.0 also defaults to ssh and if you have ssh doing
compression by default that could affect it.
You don't show your command-line so nothing else comes to
mind.

> 
> 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. ;)

Most likely differences in the build options and environment.

> 
> 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.
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
________________________________________________________________
	J.W. Schultz            Pegasystems Technologies
	email address:		jw at pegasys.ws

		Remember Cernan and Schmitt