Re: Bugs and features

[Ted Zlatanov]

Andrew Mayhew <amayhew@icewire.com> writes:

> But that's all just silliness anyway.  Once cfengine stopped barfing
> on files with the word "Bad" at the beginning of a line, replacing
> its transport became fairly irrelevant.  The problem that I see with
> using rsync or even just its algorithm is that while it can use your
> network more efficiently by only sending diverentials, the figuring
> out what the differential blocks to send can create a significant
> burden on the machine serving the files.  Which in the long run
> means that you can't serve as many simultaneous clients because of
> server load.  Besides, putting that workload on the server means
> that you've stepped away from the general philosophy of cfengine
> which puts scalability before most things.  And the only way to
> scale is to rely on a central server to do any work as little as
> possible.

That's certainly true.  For certain cases, however, the rsync
algorithm is much better than anything else I've used.  This reminds
me of the Xmodem/Ymodem-G/Zmodem protocols; each had advantages
(popularity, stability, speed, resuming of transfers) but there was
never just one clear winner.

Thanks
Ted