Hi Devs and others, First, many thanks for 14+ years of personal usage rsync. I'm trying to rsync to an sshfs mount point instead of using ssh transport. The reason for this is that I'm using encfs to create files which land on the (untrusted) destination encrypted. After witnessing stalled rsync progress, a barely utilized internet connection and and idle CPU, I stripped this down to a testcase that's just an rsync to an sshfs mount point. That testcase floods the connection for a bit, but when it gets to a dir with lots (2500) of small files, it slows to a crawl. Barely any bandwidth is being used, and barely any CPU. strace shows that the writes are infrequent, and in between it's doing lstat's, chmod's and such. The rsync process lstat'ing the destination seems to block the writes? Some strace output here: http://pastebin.com/fKcMjKEz Command line is: rsync -rv --size-only --no-group --no-owner --no-perms --no-times --whole-file --inplace --exclude-from SOMEFILE /data /mnt/remote With those options, I think I've succeeded in minimizing the number of lstats and chmods it has to do over the ssh connection. (For reference, a simpler rsync -rv has poor performance too.) I understand rsync is running its destination process on the local machine, and then doing file I/O over sshfs. I understand why that might be slow, however a plain cp floods the connection. Is there anything else I can do to optimize (minimize) the I/O so rsync is fast over sshfs? --outbuf? Batch mode? I wonder if the rsync processes are fighting/blocking too much, rather than just letting large blocks of writes happen? Regards, Greg