Rsync over NFS mount sending whole files

[Paul Slootman]

On Fri 28 Oct 2005, Anban Mestry wrote:

> Amazing. Connecting to the NFS server directly instead of through a
> mount results in much better transfers. Thank you. It looks like just
> the updated portions of the files are zoomed across.

That is the case...

> A dumb question, but why? Does the rsync daemon on the server side
> have anything to do with this? Or does the NFS client act as if the

Of course; the rsync daemon isn't just a passive data mover. It reads
blocks and uses checksums to determine what parts are different.

> mount is a "local" directory and tries to do read and writes just as
> it would on disk?

As far as rsync is concerned (and most of all the other utilities you
have at your disposal on a Unix / linux system) an NFS-mounted
filesystem _is_ local, after all it's just a part of the filesystem
space. That's the point of NFS mounts, isn't it?


Paul Slootman