rsyncing many files and hard links: optimisation suggestions?

[Wayne Davison]

On Fri, Sep 29, 2006 at 12:10:51PM +0200, Judith Retief wrote:
> I'm going to have three copies of real-file, rather than one copy and
> two hard links, isn't it? 

Yes, rsync can only hard-link together the files that are in a single
transfer.

What version of rsync are you running?  Hard-linking got a lot more
efficient in modern versions (it got a lot better in 2.6.1, and there
were some minor improvements since then).

> When I do an strace on rsync on the client, it's almost invariably
> busy with lstat'ing the local drive. I guess this is the receiver
> building up its file list?

If the client is the receiver, then it is either doing its --delete
pass, or checking if files are up-to-date or not.  You'll save some disk
I/O by switching from --delete to --delete-during (so that a directory
gets checked for sending and deleting at about the same time).

..wayne..