Common memory usage questions

[W. Michael Petullo]

I have started investigating the memory usage of the rsync algorithm since
installing OpenWRT on a Linksys WRT160NL router with only 32MB of RAM. I
have read several discussions about rsync's use of memory.

Rsync consumes all of the memory on my router even when I ensure
incremental scanning is used. This is not what I expect. The directory I
am recursively synchronizing contains 56,545 directories in its tree.
However, the maximum number of entries in any one directory is only 2,783.

I have been looking into working around this by breaking up the
synchronization task. Has anyone else come up with a good technique to do
this? I have seen references to this idea, but no concrete code. What I am
doing right now is:

find . -type d -print -exec sh -c "rsync --dirs -vv -l -p -e ssh "\{\}"/*
root at host.example.com:/DEST-DIR/"\{\} \;

This is a bit slow because I need to establish SSH connections and
initialize rsync 56,545 times.

I'd like to hear other people's solutions.

Mike