rsync freezes when copying several million files

[Wayne Davison]

On Tue, Aug 22, 2006 at 09:37:42AM +0200, initiators at free.fr wrote:
> From what I've been reading in the FAQ and the ML rsync will use 100
> bytes per files (6 GB), and I'll probably get a x3 "bonus" (18 GB) for
> using the --delete and -H options.

Those are old numbers for older versions.  Rsync now only allocates a
single extra directory at a time for any of the --delete options (and
--delete-during saves a lot of disk I/O for large file sets).  The -H
option now allocates memory based on how many hard-linked files there
are, and is still more memory efficient than it used to be even if all
files are found to be hard-linked.  (I don't have an estimated value
of what it takes off hand.)

..wayne..