remote files not being deleted

[jw schultz]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 08:36:26PM -0600, Trey Nolen wrote:
> I've got an issue with remote files being deleted after the local file has
> been deleted. For some reason, this isn't happening.  I'm running rsync
> 2.5.6 protocol 26 (yes, I know there are newer versions, but logistics
> dictates that I can't upgrade right now).  I have used
> the --delete, --delete-after, and --ignore-errors options in all sorts of
> combinations.
> 
> An example of the calling command follows:
> rsync -avR -e
> sh --numeric-ids --delete --progress  --delete-after--ignore-errors --exclud
> e /proc/ / root at backupserver:/
> 
> OK, the weird part is that it will delete files if I do a relatively small
> part of the file system (say /root/ for instance).  I'm not sure what the
> limit is on where it quits working.  Is this something that's been seen
> before? I looked through the archives but didn't find anything relating to
> this.
> 
> Any suggestions?  I guess I could run multiple jobs and do each directory
> separately, but that is less than optimal.  This is occurring on SEVERAL
> computers.  The client and server side are both Linux with ext3 filesystems.
> I have some client machines running rsync under Cywin, but I haven't checked
> to see if they have the issue yet.

It may be that you are running out of memory.  --delete
causes the a second file list (about 100bytes/file) to be
created contianing all the files existing on the receiver.
Combined with --delete-after this happens at the time when
the memory usage is at its greatest due to copy-on-write and
fragmentation.

You may want to try without --delete-after.  That would
reduce the memory requirements somewhat and if you do
run out of memory with --delete it will be more obvious
because the rsync will fail outright.


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

		Remember Cernan and Schmitt