error in rsync protocol data stream

[Wayne Davison]

On Thu, Feb 12, 2004 at 10:28:31PM -0500, Ray Lischner wrote:
> According to the FAQ-o-matic, rsync needs about 100 bytes/file. I am
> copying about 1,000,000 files, so that comes out to roughly 100MB. The
> system has 192MB of physical RAM.

In addition to what J.W. says, also keep in mind that this estimate is
per process.  If you're doing a local copy (with all 3 processes on the
same machine) you'll start out needing twice as much memory (only twice
because 2 of the processes share most of their memory).  As the transfer
progresses, the receiving side's memory slowly becomes unshared until
the 2 processes consume about twice as much real memory as they started
out consuming (even though they aren't actually growing in size).

The CVS version now has code that prevents this copy-on-write unsharing
of memory on the receiving side, but only if file permissions are being
preserved.  It also uses significantly less memory in the per-file
structures and in the hard-link handling.

..wayne..