updatinator benchmarking (Was: rsync benchmarking)

[Dan Williams]

On Wed, 2007-07-11 at 23:47 +1000, tridge at samba.org wrote:
> Alexander,
> 
> I should mention that doing better than rsync with a custom solution
> is not unexpected. rsync tries to be fairly general purpose, and
> special purpose delta tools can almost always do better, as they can
> take advantage of more information about the data.

Well, what we're more concerned about is spreading around the load of
updates, both from a network traffic perspective and a
server-utilization perspective than any type of "beating" of rsync.
More of a peer-to-peer model using standard protocols like HTTP.
Nothing against rsync, it's quite appropriate for a centrally-managed
system with fairly reliable network connections, but that's not the
problem that updatinator is actually attempting to solve...  different
approaches to the same problem really.

Dan

> At least rsync provides a harder target to beat than scp or ftp would,
> so its useful in that way :-)
> 
> One thing to watch is round trips. Large numbers of http GET requests
> means lots of round trips. rsync uses very few round trips, so it
> tends to do well on high latency links.
> 
> Cheers, Tridge
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