This script is a simple drop-in replacement for rsync for parallelising your data transfer.
Rsync is the tool of choice for copying/syncing data between locations.
It is capable of only transfering files which have changed and resuming upload/downloads.
However, the transfer speed of a single rsync can be somewhat slow.
This is a problem when transfering a large amount of data as it will take some time to complete.
If your rsync contains lots of files, you can benefit from transfering files in parallel. Thus benfiting from a more effective use of your available network bandwidth and gettging the job done faster.
If your rsync command looks like this:
rsync \
--times --recursive --progress \
--exclude "raw_reads" --exclude ".snakemake" \
user@example.com:/my_remote_dir/ /my_local_dir/Simply replace the rsync executable for this script:
./prsync \
--times --recursive --progress \
--exclude "raw_reads" --exclude ".snakemake" \
user@example.com:/my_remote_dir/ /my_local_dir/By default, the script will use 1 parallel job for each processor on the machine.
This is determined by nproc and if this fails, we fall back to 10 parallel jobs for transfering files.
This behaviour can be overriden by using --parallel as the first command line argument to the script:
./prsync \
--parallel=20 \
--times --recursive --progress \
--exclude "raw_reads" --exclude ".snakemake" \
user@example.com:/my_remote_dir/ /my_local_dir/The list of files to be transfered is calulated by first running rsync in dry-run mode.
It is then split into N chunks based on the value of --parallel (10 by default).
Each "chunk" of files is then passed to parallel rsync process.
To ensure a more balanced distribution of files among chunks, files are sorted by decreasing filesize and then assigned to the chunk with the least data to process.
This ensures that chunks are of approximately the same size and have the same number of files to process.
Thus parallel rsync processes will complete at around the same time.