Marcus Müller a.k.a. "Tethpub ZNeK"
crack-admin/coderâ„¢

how to measure copy performance the wrong way

25.07.2019

Until now I thought a good way to measure copy performance is to use rsync --progress /a/local /b/local. But… have a look:

znek@creutzfeld:(~/tmp)$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=large1 bs=64M count=64 
64+0 records in
64+0 records out
4294967296 bytes transferred in 82.564186 secs (52019738 bytes/sec)
znek@creutzfeld:(~/tmp)$ time cp large1 /archive/tmp/

real    0m23.915s
user    0m0.016s
sys    0m7.577s
znek@creutzfeld:(~/tmp)$ rm /archive/tmp/large1 
znek@creutzfeld:(~/tmp)$ time rsync large1 /archive/tmp/

real    0m39.464s
user    0m32.478s
sys    0m24.831s
znek@creutzfeld:(~/tmp)$ rsync --version|grep version
rsync  version 3.1.3  protocol version 31

As you can see, for this specific workload rsync is almost twice as slow.