vanilla rsync 3.0.9 hangs after transferring ~2000 files

[Justin T Pryzby]

On Fri, Nov 02, 2012 at 02:33:13PM +0100, Christian Iversen wrote:
> However, 1 server is giving me a lot of trouble. It has a directory
> with (currently) 734088 files in it, and every time I try to backup
> this dir, rsync hangs after transferring roughly 2000 files.
> Sometimes it's around 1800, sometimes it's over 2100 (I think), but
> it's in that ballbark.

Is that using rsync:// or rsync/ssh ?  What is the commandline?

There are probably two rsync processes on the server.  Could you
strace both?  How much vram are they using?  ps e -O vsz -C rsync

What filesystem is it?  Can you create a tarball of the directory?
time c /path/to/dir |wc

Justin