Parallelise rsync using GNU Parallel

Question

I have been using a rsync script to synchronize data at one host with the data at another host. The data has numerous small-sized files that contribute to almost 1.2TB.

In order to sync those files, I have been using rsync command as follows:

rsync -avzm --stats --human-readable --include-from proj.lst /data/projects REMOTEHOST:/data/

The contents of proj.lst are as follows:

+ proj1
+ proj1/*
+ proj1/*/*
+ proj1/*/*/*.tar
+ proj1/*/*/*.pdf
+ proj2
+ proj2/*
+ proj2/*/*
+ proj2/*/*/*.tar
+ proj2/*/*/*.pdf
...
...
...
- *

As a test, I picked up two of those projects (8.5GB of data) and I executed the command above. Being a sequential process, it tool 14 minutes 58 seconds to complete. So, for 1.2TB of data it would take several hours.

If I would could multiple rsync processes in parallel (using &, xargs or parallel), it would save my time.

I tried with below command with parallel (after cding to source directory) and it took 12 minutes 37 seconds to execute:

parallel --will-cite -j 5 rsync -avzm --stats --human-readable {} REMOTEHOST:/data/ ::: .

This should have taken 5 times less time, but it didn't. I think, I'm going wrong somewhere.

How can I run multiple rsync processes in order to reduce the execution time?

Answer 1

Following steps did the job for me:

1. Run the rsync --dry-run first in order to get the list of files those would be affected.

$ rsync -avzm --stats --safe-links --ignore-existing --dry-run \
    --human-readable /data/projects REMOTE-HOST:/data/ > /tmp/transfer.log

2. I fed the output of cat transfer.log to parallel in order to run 5 rsyncs in parallel, as follows:

$ cat /tmp/transfer.log | \
    parallel --will-cite -j 5 rsync -avzm --relative \
      --stats --safe-links --ignore-existing \
      --human-readable {} REMOTE-HOST:/data/ > result.log

Here, --relative option (link) ensured that the directory structure for the affected files, at the source and destination, remains the same (inside /data/ directory), so the command must be run in the source folder (in example, /data/projects).

Answer 2

I would strongly discourage anybody from using the accepted answer, a better solution is to crawl the top level directory and launch a proportional number of rync operations.

I have a large zfs volume and my source was was a cifs mount. Both are linked with 10G, and in some benchmarks can saturate the link. Performance was evaluated using zpool iostat 1.

The source drive was mounted like:

mount -t cifs -o username=,password= //static_ip/70tb /mnt/Datahoarder_Mount/ -o vers=3.0

Using a single rsync process:

rsync -h -v -r -P -t /mnt/Datahoarder_Mount/ /StoragePod

the io meter reads:

StoragePod  30.0T   144T      0  1.61K      0   130M
StoragePod  30.0T   144T      0  1.61K      0   130M
StoragePod  30.0T   144T      0  1.62K      0   130M

This in synthetic benchmarks (crystal disk), performance for sequential write approaches 900 MB/s which means the link is saturated. 130MB/s is not very good, and the difference between waiting a weekend and two weeks.

So, I built the file list and tried to run the sync again (I have a 64 core machine):

cat /home/misha/Desktop/rsync_logs_syncs/Datahoarder_Mount.log | parallel --will-cite -j 16 rsync -avzm --relative --stats --safe-links --size-only --human-readable {} /StoragePod/ > /home/misha/Desktop/rsync_logs_syncs/Datahoarder_Mount_result.log

and it had the same performance!

StoragePod  29.9T   144T      0  1.63K      0   130M
StoragePod  29.9T   144T      0  1.62K      0   130M
StoragePod  29.9T   144T      0  1.56K      0   129M

As an alternative I simply ran rsync on the root folders:

rsync -h -v -r -P -t /mnt/Datahoarder_Mount/Mikhail/Marcello_zinc_bone /StoragePod/Marcello_zinc_bone
rsync -h -v -r -P -t /mnt/Datahoarder_Mount/Mikhail/fibroblast_growth /StoragePod/fibroblast_growth
rsync -h -v -r -P -t /mnt/Datahoarder_Mount/Mikhail/QDIC /StoragePod/QDIC
rsync -h -v -r -P -t /mnt/Datahoarder_Mount/Mikhail/sexy_dps_cell /StoragePod/sexy_dps_cell

This actually boosted performance:

StoragePod  30.1T   144T     13  3.66K   112K   343M
StoragePod  30.1T   144T     24  5.11K   184K   469M
StoragePod  30.1T   144T     25  4.30K   196K   373M

In conclusion, as @Sandip Bhattacharya brought up, write a small script to get the directories and parallel that. Alternatively, pass a file list to rsync. But don't create new instances for each file.

Answer 3

I personally use this simple one:

ls -1 | parallel rsync -a {} /destination/directory/

Which only is usefull when you have more than a few non-near-empty directories, else you'll end up having almost every rsync terminating and the last one doing all the job alone.

Answer 4

A tested way to do the parallelized rsync is: http://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/man.html#EXAMPLE:-Parallelizing-rsync

rsync is a great tool, but sometimes it will not fill up the available bandwidth. This is often a problem when copying several big files over high speed connections.

The following will start one rsync per big file in src-dir to dest-dir on the server fooserver:

cd src-dir; find . -type f -size +100000 | \
parallel -v ssh fooserver mkdir -p /dest-dir/{//}\; \
  rsync -s -Havessh {} fooserver:/dest-dir/{} 

The directories created may end up with wrong permissions and smaller files are not being transferred. To fix those run rsync a final time:

rsync -Havessh src-dir/ fooserver:/dest-dir/ 

If you are unable to push data, but need to pull them and the files are called digits.png (e.g. 000000.png) you might be able to do:

seq -w 0 99 | parallel rsync -Havessh fooserver:src/*{}.png destdir/

Answer 5

For multi destination syncs, I am using

parallel rsync -avi /path/to/source ::: host1: host2: host3:

Hint: All ssh connections are established with public keys in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Answer 6

I always google for parallel rsync as I always forget the full command, but no solution worked for me as I wanted - either it includes multiple steps or needs to install parallel. I ended up using this one-liner to sync multiple folders:

find dir/ -type d|xargs -P 5 -I % sh -c 'rsync -a --delete --bwlimit=50000 $(echo dir/%/ host:/dir/%/)'

-P 5 is the amount of processes you want to spawn - use 0 for unlimited (obviously not recommended).

--bwlimit to avoid using all bandwidth.

-I % argument provided by find (directory found in dir/)

$(echo dir/%/ host:/dir/%/) - prints source and destination directories which are read by rsync as arguments. % is replaced by xargs with directory name found by find.

Let's assume I have two directories in /home: dir1 and dir2. I run find /home -type d|xargs -P 5 -I % sh -c 'rsync -a --delete --bwlimit=50000 $(echo /home/%/ host:/home/%/)'. So rsync command will run as two processes (two processes because /home has two directories) with following arguments:

rsync -a --delete --bwlimit=50000 /home/dir1/ host:/home/dir1/
rsync -a --delete --bwlimit=50000 /home/dir1/ host:/home/dir1/