rsync getting stuck while "building file list"

[Carlos Carvalho]

Water Kingdom (waterkingdom at gmail.com) wrote on 3 July 2009 15:49:
 >We are using rysnc utility for transferring ~90GB data across the machines.
 >We noticed that for small folders, rsync is working fine but the moment we
 >switch to 90GB folder, it gets stuck at "building file list". We even left
 >it running overnight e.g. 16 hours but it never came out.
 >
 >We are using simple rsync syntax
 >#rsync -av --delete /data1 server2:/data
 >
 >RPM version 2.68-3.1

How many files are there? What happens if you run find /data1 -ls?

Building the file list is a machine killer because it's very disk seek
intensive.