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Say you need to sync a large number of file between two servers.

Here's the scenario:

The data to be transferred consists of a thousand directories containing up to 10k files each, and those files are mostly around 10kbytes.

Overall the data is around 400GB.

Because the data is not that large, one might think that it's a straight forward transfer, but because the data is made up of hundreds of thousands files there will be a lot of file stat'ing. This results in a rather lengthy transfer even if the data transfer speed is ignored.

So, when transferring this data from A to B, where initially all the data resides in A and none in B

What would be the best approach:
Pulling, within A:
rsync -a --delete /data/ B:/data/

pushing, within B:
rsync -a --delete A:/data/ /data/

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What makes you believe the direction of the transfer had any influence on the checks involved? – Ansgar Wiechers Sep 16 '12 at 13:27
This depends entirely on your upload vs download speed, surely? If download speed is higher, pulling will be faster than pushing. But as Ansgar points out, the direction has nothing to do with what rsync does on both ends before any files get transferred. – Randolph West Sep 16 '12 at 17:35

closed as not constructive by Xavierjazz, techie007, 8088, Dave Rook, BBlake Sep 17 '12 at 14:22

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