comparing cvsup vs. rsync

["Justin C. Sherrill" <justin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Since cvsup is somewhat of a hassle to build, discussion comes up from
time to time about switching to rsync.  Rsync is generally accepted as
slower/more resource intensive, but how much hasn't been quantified.  I
wanted to look into this in as un-bikesheddy a way as possible...

I timed repeated retrievals of src from theshell.com over the past few
weeks, and here's the result.

Retrieving all of src:
    cvsup averaged about 11.5 minutes
    rsync averaged about 19 minutes

Retrieving only the last 24 hours of changes:
    cvsup averaged about 18 seconds
    rsync averaged about 25 seconds

Caveats: I didn't test CPU usage.  Also, this was with rsync 2.x - there's
a new version 3 on the way that is supposed to have improvments.

So, it looks like rsync runs somewhat slower than cvsup, but not
catastrophically so.  Also, rsync can't do checkouts of particular
revisions, so we'd have to have a certain checked out version of the
source to allow people to retrieve given releases of DragonFly.  No big
surprises here, and no clear indicator we should change.