A look at rsync performance

http://git.kitenet.net/?p=joey/home.git;a=blob_plain;f=bi...

It takes the same options as rsync, except the src and dest directories
must be specified as the first 2 parameters. And neither directory can be remote.

It operates by simply using rsync --dry-run to determine which files need to be updated, and then copying them to the dest directory using cp. rsync is run at the end to handle everything else.

Testing on my laptop, rsync takes 19 seconds to sync a directory containing a 260 mb file. local-rsync takes 8 seconds. Roughly in line with the benchmarks in this article.