Hi there, On Sun, 12 Apr 2026, Sean Blaes wrote:
We use rsync to synchronize files up to a remote host ... limited bandwidth (< 1 mbps) and is intermittent (often active only for about 10 minutes at a time, potentially hours between connections)
What's the actual connection? Simply rsync doing transfers to/from a remote host, or do you have something like a VPN in the mix? If I hadn't already tried something like that, I'd probably give it a whirl just to see if the VPN configuration could offer more control over the networking feedback to rsync, to prevent rsync from being killed. But I'm sure there's a better way, see below.
The files being transferred are 100-200 megabytes ... several files queued ... often require several windows of connectivity ...
You seem to like to make things difficult for yourself. :)
We use the following cli flags for this: `--verbose --progress --exclude=".*" --timeout=15 --partial-dir=.partial --partial --recursive --remove-source-files`.
Can I take it that you've tried longer timeouts (in the region of hours)?
I observe that sometimes the transfer of file1 completes successfully, and then the process moves to file2. However, even after transferring file2 for several minutes, file1 remains on the client's filesystem. I've been looking a bit at the rsync code, and I think I have determined that it prioritizes transferring buffered file data over sending control messages (such as the MSG_SUCCESS message that would result in the client side file being deleted). So my suspicion is that it's loading the data buffer with data from file2 and trying to transfer that data. Consequently, the MSG_SUCCESS message is never prioritized as rsync is killed (due to end of network connection) before it can make it through, even though file1 was successfully transferred several minutes earlier. Does this sound right?
It sounds plausible to me.
Are there any outstanding bugs or feature requests that might improve this situation (I searched and couldn't find any)?
Sorry, IDK. It seems to me a very niche case which wouldn't be at the top of my list (even if I were looking at such requests, which I'm not).
It seems sensible to prioritize sending MSG_SUCCESS over file data so that this workflow works more reliably. Would that make sense?
In view of the potential for unexpected effects I'd be very hesitant to do anything like that. It would make a lot more sense to me to split the big files into small ones at the sending end, then reassemble them at the receiving end. Kinda like TCP/IP does with packets. -- 73, Ged. -- Please use reply-all for most replies to avoid omitting the mailing list. To unsubscribe or change options: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
