Re: [rdiff-backup-users] rdiff-backup/rsync +ssh performance comparison

[Douglas Bollinger]

On Mon, 06 Feb 2006 17:23:50 -0500
Vadim Kouzmine <address@hidden> wrote:

> Performed tests copying my home directory (~1GB, 21668 files) on
> workstation (Gentoo Linux, rdiff-backup 1.0.1, python 2.4.2, rsync
> 2.6.0, OpenSSH_4.2p1/no_compression)
> 
> 1)rdiff-backup /src -> /dst  3m 11s
> 
> 2)rsync /src -> /dst         2m 45s
> 
> 3)rdiff-backup localhost::/src -> /dst:  12m 5s
> 
> 4)rsync localhost:/src -> /dst: 3m 9s
> 
> So rdiff-backup is a little slower than rsync when working on local
> files, and 4 times slower when working trough ssh.

Looking in the mailing list archives, it seems that rsync is always quite a
bit faster than rdiff-backup over a network, at least the initial run.
There's been some discussion about this, but I haven't seen a real
definitive answer on whether rdiff-backup can be tweaked to be closer to
rsync performance.

My GUI has a display that shows network throughput out of eth0.  The most
of eth0 I've ever seen rdiff-backup use was 2 MB/s while this hardware has
no problem geting 11.8 MB/s with scp.  While I understand there is quite a
bit of overhead associated with syncing a bunch of small files, I've always
wondered why big files, say 600 MB, still only transfer at 2 MB/s with
rdiff-backup.

-- 
How do I type "for i in *.dvi do xdvi $i done" in a GUI?
        -- Discussion in comp.os.linux.misc on the intuitiveness of interfaces