Rsync spawning a child process when pulling files ?

[Matt McCutchen]

On Mon, 2009-06-01 at 12:22 +0200, Jan Alphenaar wrote:
> Apparently there is a difference in pushing and pulling files with rsync.
> When I push my files to the server with this command, I see one rsync
> process on my WinXP machine, just as expected

> But when I pull my files from the server to my WinXP machine with this
> command, I see two rsync processes on my WinXP machine.

> Can anybody confirm that this is the default behavior ? If yes, what would
> be the reason for spawning an extra child rsync process ?

Yes, this is the expected behavior.  For each job, rsync uses one
process on the sending side (the "sender") and two on the receiving side
(the "generator" and the "receiver"); see
http://rsync.samba.org/how-rsync-works.html .  As a special case, a
local copy uses three processes all on the local machine.  A listening
daemon has a master process accepting new connections in addition to the
process(es) servicing existing connections, while a single-use daemon
has no master process.

-- 
Matt