msrsync (multi-stream rsync) is a python wrapper around rsync. It only depends on python >= 2.6 and rsync.
It will split the transfer in multiple buckets while the source is scanned and will hopefully help maximizing the usage of the available bandwidth by running a configurable number of rsync processes in parallel. The main limitation is it does not handle remote source or target directory, they must be locally accessible (local disk, nfs/cifs/other mountpoint). I hope to address this in a near future.
$ msrsync -p 4 /source /destination # you can also use -P/--progress and --stats optionsThis will copy /source directory in the /destination directory (same behaviour as rsync regarding the slash handling) using 4 rsync processes (using "-aS --numeric-ids" as default option. Could be override with --rsync option). msrsync will split the files and directory list into bucket of 1G or 1000 files maximum (see --size and --files options) before feeding them to each rsync process in parallel using the --files-from option. As long as the source and the destination can cope with the parallel I/O (think big boring "enterprise grade" NAS), it should be faster than a single rsync.
msrsyncshares the same spirit as fpart (and its fpsync associated tool) by Ganaël Laplanche or parsync by Harry Mangalam. Those are two fantastic much more complete tools used in the field to do real work. Please check them out, they might be what you're looking for.
You can also check fcp from the pcircle project. It looks very powerful. See the associated publication.
Why write msrsync if tools like fpart, parsync or pftool exist ? While reasonable, their dependencies can be a point of friction given the constraints we can have on a given system. When you're lucky, you can use your package manager (fpart seems to be well supported among various GNU/Linux and FreeBSD distribution: FreeBSD, Debian, Ubuntu, Archlinux, OBS) to deal with the requirements but more often than not, I found myself struggling with the sad state of the machine I'm working with.
That's why the only dependencies of msrsync are python >=2.6 and rsync. What python 2.6 ? I'm aiming RHEL6 like distribution as a minimum requirement here, so I'm stuck with python 2.6. I miss some cool features, but that's part of the project.
The devil is in the details. If you need a starting point to think about data migration, this overview by Jeff Layton is very informative: Moving Your Data – It’s Not Always Pleasant.
The "How to transfer large amounts of data via network" article by parsync author is updated regularly and its worth a read also.
If you can read french, I co-wrote an article with Ganaël Laplanche about fpart : Parallélisez vos transferts de fichiers.
You might be also interested by this Intel whitepaper on data migration : Data Migration with
Intel® Enterprise Edition for Lustre* Software which mentions all of those tools (but not msrsync).
msrsync is a single python file, you just have to download it. Or if you prefer, you can clone the repository and use the provided Makefile:
$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jbd/msrsync/master/msrsync && chmod +x msrsyncor
$ git clone https://github.com/jbd/msrsync && cd msrsync && sudo make install$ msrsync --help
usage: msrsync [options] [--rsync "rsync-options-string"] SRCDIR [SRCDIR2...] DESTDIR
or: msrsync --selftest
msrsync options:
-p, --processes ... number of rsync processes to use [1]
-f, --files ... limit buckets to <files> files number [1000]
-s, --size ... limit partitions to BYTES size (1024 suffixes: K, M, G, T, P, E, Z, Y) [1G]
-b, --buckets ... where to put the buckets files (default: auto temporary directory)
-k, --keep do not remove buckets directory at the end
-j, --show show bucket directory
-P, --progress show progress
--stats show additional stats
-d, --dry-run do not run rsync processes
-v, --version print version
rsync options:
-r, --rsync ... MUST be last option. rsync options as a quoted string ["-aS --numeric-ids"]. The "--from0 --files-from=... --quiet --verbose --stats --log-file=..." options will ALWAYS be added, no
matter what. Be aware that this will affect all rsync *from/filter files if you want to use them. See rsync(1) manpage for details.
self-test options:
-t, --selftest run the integrated unit and functional tests
-e, --bench run benchmarks
-g, --benchshm run benchmarks in /dev/shm or the directory in $SHM environment variable
If you want to use specific options for the rsync processes, use the --rsync option.
$ msrsync -p4 --rsync "-a --numeric-ids --inplace" source destinationSome examples:
$ msrsync -p 8 /usr/share/doc/ /tmp/doc/
$ msrsync -P -p 8 /usr/share/doc/ /tmp/doc/
[33491/33491 entries] [602.1 M/602.1 M transferred] [3378 entries/s] [60.7 M/s bw] [monq 1] [jq 1]
$ msrsync -P -p 8 --stats /usr/share/doc/ /tmp/doc/
[33491/33491 entries] [602.1 M/602.1 M transferred] [3533 entries/s] [63.5 M/s bw] [monq 1] [jq 1]
Status: SUCCESS
Working directory: /home/jbdenis/Code/msrsync
Command line: ./msrsync -P -p 8 --stats /usr/share/doc/ /tmp/doc/
Total size: 602.1 M
Total entries: 33491
Buckets number: 34
Mean entries per bucket: 985
Mean size per bucket: 17.7 M
Entries per second: 3533
Speed: 63.5 M/s
Rsync workers: 8
Total rsync's processes (34) cumulative runtime: 73.0s
Crawl time: 0.4s (4.3% of total runtime)
Total time: 9.5s
You can launch a benchmark using the --bench option or make bench. It is only for testing purpose. They are comparing the performance between vanilla rsync and msrsync using multiple options. Since I'm just creating a huge fake file tree with empty files, you won't see any msrsync benefits here, unless you're trying with many many files. They need to be run as root since I'm dropping disk cache between run.
$ sudo make bench # or sudo msrsync --bench
Benchmarks with 100000 entries (95% of files):
rsync -a --numeric-ids took 14.05 seconds (speedup x1)
msrsync --processes 1 --files 1000 --size 1G took 18.58 seconds (speedup x0.76)
msrsync --processes 2 --files 1000 --size 1G took 10.61 seconds (speedup x1.32)
msrsync --processes 4 --files 1000 --size 1G took 6.60 seconds (speedup x2.13)
msrsync --processes 8 --files 1000 --size 1G took 6.58 seconds (speedup x2.14)
msrsync --processes 16 --files 1000 --size 1G took 6.66 seconds (speedup x2.11)
Please test on real data instead =). There is also a --benchshm option that will perform the benchmark in /dev/shm.
Here is a real test on a big nas box (not known for handling small files well) on a 1G network (you'll see that is more than useless due to the I/O overhead) with the linux 4.0.4 kernel decompressed source 21 times in different folders:
$ ls /mnt/nfs/linux-src/
0 1 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2 20 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
$ du -s --apparent-size --bytes /mnt/nfs/linux-src
11688149821 /mnt/nfs/linux-src
$ du -s --apparent-size --human /mnt/nfs/linux-src
11G /mnt/nfs/linux-src
$ find /mnt/nfs/linux-src -type f | wc -l
1027908
$ find /mnt/nfs/linux-src -type d | wc -l
66360
The source and the destination are on an nfs mount.
Let's run rsync and msrsync with a various number of process:
$ rm -rf /mnt/nfs/dest
$ echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches > /dev/null
$ time rsync -a --numeric-ids /mnt/nfs/linux-src /mnt/nfs/dest
real 136m10.406s
user 1m54.939s
sys 7m31.188s
$ rm -rf /mnt/nfs/dest
$ echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches > /dev/null
$ msrsync -p 1 /mnt/nfs/linux-src /mnt/nfs/dest
real 144m8.954s
user 2m20.426s
sys 8m4.127s
$ rm -rf /mnt/nfs/dest
$ echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches > /dev/null
$ msrsync -p 2 /mnt/nfs/linux-src /mnt/nfs/dest
real 73m57.312s
user 2m27.543s
sys 7m56.484s
$ rm -rf /mnt/nfs/dest
$ echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches > /dev/null
$ msrsync -p 4 /mnt/nfs/linux-src /mnt/nfs/dest
real 42m31.105s
user 2m24.196s
sys 7m46.568s
$ rm -rf /mnt/nfs/dest
$ echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches > /dev/null
$ msrsync -p 8 /mnt/nfs/linux-src /mnt/nfs/dest
real 36m55.141s
user 2m27.149s
sys 7m40.392s
$ rm -rf /mnt/nfs/dest
$ echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches > /dev/null
$ msrsync -p 16 /mnt/nfs/linux-src /mnt/nfs/dest
real 33m0.976s
user 2m35.848s
sys 7m40.623s
Ridiculous rates due to the size of each file and the I/O overhead (nfs + network), but that's a real use case and we've got nice speedup without too much thinking : just use msrync and you're good to go. That's exactly what I wanted. Here is a summary of the previous results:
| Command | Time | Entries per second | Bandwidth (MBytes/s) | Speedup |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| rsync | 136m10s | 133 | 1.36 | x1 |
| msrsync -p 1 | 144m9s | 126 | 1.28 | x0.94 |
| msrsync -p 2 | 73m57s | 246 | 2.51 | x1.84 |
| msrsync -p 4 | 42m31s | 428 | 4.36 | x3.20 |
| msrsync -p 8 | 36m55s | 494 | 5.03 | x3.68 |
| msrsync -p 16 | 33m0s | 552 | 5.62 | x4.12 |
Astute readers will notify the slight overhead of msrync over the equivalent rsync in the single process case. This overhead vanishes (but still exists) when you increase processes number.
-
The
rsyncprocesses are always run with the--from0 --files-from=... --quiet --verbose --stats --log-file=...options, no matter what.--from0option affects--exclude-from,--include-from,--files-from, and any merged files specified in a--filterrule. -
This may seem obvious but if the source or the destination of the copy cannot handle parallel I/O well, you won't see any benefits (quite the opposite in fact) using
msrsync.
I'm targeting python 2.6 without external dependencies besides rsync. The provided Makefile is just an helper around the embedded testing and coverage.py:
$ make help
Please use `make <target>' where <target> is one of
clean => clean all generated files
cov => coverage report using /usr/bin/python-coverage (use COVERAGE env to change that)
covhtml => coverage html report
man => build manpage
test => run embedded tests
install => install msrsync in /usr/bin (use DESTDIR env to change that)
lint => run pylint
bench => run benchmarks (linux only. Need root to drop buffer cache between run)
benchshm => run benchmarks using /dev/shm (linux only. Need root to drop buffer cache between run)
There is an integrated test suite (--selftest option, or make test). Since I'm using unittest from python 2.6 library, I cannot capture the output of the tests (buffer parameter from TestResult object appeared in 2.7).
$ make test # or msrsync --selftest
test_get_human_size (__main__.TestHelpers)
convert bytes to human readable string ... ok
test_get_human_size2 (__main__.TestHelpers)
convert bytes to human readable string ... ok
test_human_size (__main__.TestHelpers)
convert human readable size to bytes ... ok
...
test simple msrsync synchronisation ... ok
test_msrsync_cli_2_processes (__main__.TestSyncCLI)
test simple msrsync synchronisation ... ok
test_msrsync_cli_4_processes (__main__.TestSyncCLI)
test simple msrsync synchronisation ... ok
test_msrsync_cli_8_processes (__main__.TestSyncCLI)
test simple msrsync synchronisation ... ok
test_simple_msrsync_cli (__main__.TestSyncCLI)
test simple msrsync synchronisation ... ok
test_simple_rsync (__main__.TestSyncCLI)
test simple rsync synchronisation ... ok
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 29 tests in 3.320s
OK