graeme_p - 8:14 am on Jul 2, 2009 (gmt 0)

Sorry, I did not make that clear.

What the discussion on the rsync mailing list indicated was that sometimes you gain an advantage from rsync's ability to send only deltas etc. On a very fast network such as a LAN the overhead of doing that actually leads to worse performance, especially when dealing with compressed file formats.

This can even mean that copying an entire directory with scp can be faster than syncing it with rsync (for example if you have a directory of media files, most of which have changed). That surprised me.