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4x faster network file sync with rclone (vs rsync) (2025)

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/4x-faster-network-file-sync-rclone-vs-rsync/
94•indigodaddy•3d ago

Comments

baal80spam•1h ago
I'll keep saying that rclone is a fantastic and underrated piece of software.
digiown•1h ago
rclone is super cool, but unfortunately many of the providers it supports has such low ratelimits, that it's fairly difficult to use it to transfer much data at all.
plasticsoprano•38m ago
This has been my problem. Not necessarily that the rate limits are low, many can be gotten around by using multiple users to do the work since the limits are per user, but how rclone handles those rate limits when they hit them. The exponential back off will end up making hours and days long delays that will screw a migration.
indigodaddy•1h ago
One thing that sets rsync apart perhaps is the handling of hard links when you don't want to send both/duplicated files to the destination? Not sure if rclone can do that.
cachius•1h ago
rclone --multi-thread-streams allows transfers in parallel, like robocopy /MT

You can also run multiple instances of rsync, the problem seems how to efficiently divide the set of files.

pama•1h ago
Sometimes find (with desired maxdepth) piped to gnu-parallel rsync is fine.
SoftTalker•1h ago
robocopy! Wow, blast from the past. Used to use it all the time when I worked in a Windows shop.
bob1029•1h ago
I am using robocopy right now on a project. The /MIR option is extremely useful for incrementally maintaining copies of large local directories.
cachius•43m ago
> efficiently divide the set of files.

It turns out, fpart does just that! Fpart is a Filesystem partitioner. It helps you sort file trees and pack them into bags (called "partitions"). It is developed in C and available under the BSD license.

It comes with an rsync wrapper, fpsync. Now I'd like to see a benchmark of that vs rclone! via https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/189878/#688469 via https://stackoverflow.com/q/24058544/#comment93435424_255320...

https://www.fpart.org/

ericpauley•1h ago
Rclone is a fantastic tool, but my favorite part of it is actually the underyling FS library. I've started baking Rclone FS into internal Go tooling and now everything transparently supports reading/writing to either local or remote storage. Really great for being able to test data analysis code locally and then running as batch jobs elsewhere.
digiown•1h ago
Note there is no intrinsic reason running multiple streams should be faster than one [EDIT: "at this scale"]. It almost always indicates some bottleneck in the application or TCP tuning. (Though, very fast links can overwhelm slow hardware, and ISPs might do some traffic shaping too, but this doesn't apply to local links).

SSH was never really meant to be a high performance data transfer tool, and it shows. For example, it has a hardcoded maximum receive buffer of 2MiB (separate from the TCP one), which drastically limits transfer speed over high BDP links (even a fast local link, like the 10gbps one the author has). The encryption can also be a bottleneck. hpn-ssh [1] aims to solve this issue but I'm not so sure about running an ssh fork on important systems.

1. https://github.com/rapier1/hpn-ssh

mprovost•53m ago
In general TCP just isn't great for high performance. In the film industry we used to use a commercial product Aspera (now owned by IBM) which emulated ftp or scp but used UDP with forward error correction (instead of TCP retransmission). You could configure it to use a specific amount of bandwidth and it would just push everything else off the network to achieve it.
digiown•45m ago
There's an open source implementation that does something similar but for a more specific use case: https://github.com/apernet/tcp-brutal

There's gotta be a less antisocial way though. I'd say using BBR and increasing the buffer sizes to 64 MiB does the trick in most cases.

pezgrande•37m ago
Was the torrent protocol considered at some point? Always surprised how little presence has in the industry considering how good the technology is.
ambicapter•8m ago
torrent is great for many-to-one type downloads but I assume GP is talking about single machine to single machine transfers.
dekhn•52m ago
Single file overheads (opening millions of tiny files whose metadata is not in the OS cache and reading them) appears to be an intrinsic reason (intrinsic to the OS, at least).
pixl97•32m ago
IOPs and disk read depth are common limits.

Depending on what you're doing it can be faster to leave your files in a solid archive that is less likely to be fragmented and get contiguous reads.

yegle•48m ago
The author tried running rsyncd demon so it's not _just_ the ssh protocol.
Saris•37m ago
Wouldn't lots of streams speed up transfers of thousands of small files?
digiown•9m ago
If the application handles them serially, then yeah. But one can imagine the application opening files in threads, buffering them, and then finally sending it at full speed, so in that sense it is an application issue. If you truly have millions of small files, you're more likely to be bottlenecked by disk IO performance rather than application or network, though. My primary use case for ssh streams is zfs send, which is mostly bottlenecked by ssh itself.
oceanplexian•30m ago
Uhh.. I work with this stuff daily and there are a LOT of intrinsic reasons a single stream would be slower than running multiple: MPLS ECMP hashing you over a single path, a single loss event with a high BDP causing congestion control to kick in for a single flow, CPU IRQ affinity, probably many more I’m not thinking like the inner workings of NIC offloading queues.

Source: Been in big tech for roughly ten years now trying to get servers to move packets faster

digiown•14m ago
Ha, it sounds like the best way to learn something is to make a confident and incorrect claim :)

> MPLS ECMP hashing you over a single path

This is kinda like the traffic shaping I was talking about though, but fair enough. It's not an inherent limitation of a single stream, just a consequence of how your network is designed.

> a single loss event with a high BDP

I thought BBR mitigates this. Even if it doesn't, I'd still count that as a TCP stack issue.

At a large enough scale I'd say you are correct that multiple streams is inherently easier to optimize throughput for. But probably not a single 1-10gb link though.

Aurornis•24m ago
> Note there is no intrinsic reason running multiple streams should be faster than one.

The issue is the serialization of operations. There is overhead for each operation which translates into dead time between transfers.

However there are issues that can cause singular streams to underperform multiple streams in the real world once you reach a certain scale or face problems like packet loss.

coreylane•1h ago
RClone has been so useful over the years I built a fully managed service on top of it specifically for moving data between cloud storage providers: https://dataraven.io/

My goal is to smooth out some of the operational rough edges I've seen companies deal with when using the tool:

  - Team workspaces with role-based access control
  - Event notifications & webhooks – Alerts on transfer failure or resource changes via Slack, Teams, Discord, etc.
  - Centralized log storage
  - Vault integrations – Connect 1Password, Doppler, or Infisical for zero-knowledge credential handling (no more plain text files with credentials)
  - 10 Gbps connected infrastructure (Pro tier) – High-throughput Linux systems for large transfers
noname120•1h ago
I hope that you sponsor the rclone project given that it’s the core of your business! I couldn’t find any indication online that you do give back to the project. I hope I’m wrong.
jfbaro•57m ago
Me too!
coreylane•34m ago
I'm certainly planning on sponsoring the project as soon as possible, but so far I have zero paying customers, hopefully that will change soon
stronglikedan•8m ago
that's just creepy and hella presumptuous
plasticsoprano•53m ago
How do you deal with how poorly rclone handles rate limits? It doesn't honor dropbox's retry-after header and just adds an exponential back off that, in my migrations, has resulted in a pause of days.

I've adjusted threads and the various other controls rclone offers but I still feel like I'm not see it's true potential because the second it hits a rate limit I can all but guarantee that job will have to be restarted with new settings.

coreylane•20m ago
I honestly haven't used it with Dropbox before, have you tried adjusting --tpslimit 12 --tpslimit-burst 0 flags? Are you creating a dedicated api key for the transfer? Rate limits may vary between Plus/Advanced forum.rclone.org is quite active you may want to post more details there.
packetlost•1h ago
I use tab-complete to navigate remote folder structures with rsync all the time, does rclone have that?
KolmogorovComp•35m ago
Why are rclone/rsync never used by default for app updates? Especially games with large assets.
rjmunro•9m ago
zsync is better for that. zsync precalculates all the hashes and puts them in a file alongside the main one. The client downloads the hashes, compares them to what it has then downloads the parts it is missing.

With rsync, you upload hashes of what you have, then the source has to do all the hashing work to figure out what to send you. It's slightly more efficient, but If you are supporting even 10s of downloads it's a lot of work for the source.

The other option is to send just a diff, which I believe e.g. Google Chrome does. Google invented Courgette and Zucchini which partially decompile binaries then recompile them on the other end to reduce the size of diffs. These only work for exact known previous versions, though.

I wonder if the ideas of Courgette and Zucchini can be incorporated into zsync's hashes so that you get the minimal diff, but the flexibility of not having a perfect previous version to work from.

newsoftheday•35m ago
I prefer rsync because of its delta transfer which doesn't resend files already on the destination, saving bandwidth. This combined with rsync's ability to work over ssh lets me sync anywhere rsync runs, including the cloud. It may not be faster than rclone but it is more conserving on bandwidth.
HPsquared•29m ago
Rclone can "sync" with a range of different ways to check if the existing files are the same. If no hashes are available (e.g. WebDAV) I think you can set it to check by timestamp (with a tolerance) and size.

Edit: oh I see, delta transfer only sends the changed parts of files?

xoa•32m ago
Thanks for sharing, hadn't seen it but at almost the same time he made that post I too was struggling to get decent NAS<>NAS transfer speeds with rsync. I should have thought to play more with rclone! I ended up using iSCSI but that is a lot more trouble.

>In fact, some compression modes would actually slow things down as my energy-efficient NAS is running on some slower Arm cores

Depending on the number/type of devices in the setup and usage patterns, it can be effective sometimes to have a single more powerful router and then use it directly as a hop for security or compression (or both) to a set of lower power devices. Like, I know it's not E2EE the same way to send unencrypted data to one OPNsense router, Wireguard (or Nebula or whatever tunnel you prefer) to another over the internet, and then from there to a NAS. But if the NAS is in the same physically secure rack directly attached by hardline to the router (or via isolated switch), I don't think in practice it's significantly enough less secure at the private service level to matter. If the router is a pretty important lynchpin anyone, it can be favorable to lean more heavily on that so one can go cheaper and lower power elsewhere. Not that more efficiency, hardware acceleration etc are at all bad, and conversely sometimes might make sense to have a powerful NAS/other servers and a low power router, but there are good degrees of freedom there. Handier then ever in the current crazy times where sometimes hardware that was formerly easily and cheaply available is now a king's ransom or gone and one has to improvise.

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