[beagle3]

All is true, but do note that zsync is, at least for now, a single file system. If you are rsyncing thousands of files over a slow connection (because only little has changed), rsync can often do this with just a handful of bytes more than the actual changes, and zsync needs hundreds of bytes per file just to see nothing has changed.

Use zsync to distribute a small number of large files that have small changes. If you need to rsync hierarchies with lots of files, rsync is still king.

[temp45234]

Absolutely true, the zsync client operates on a single file and doesn't manipulate file metadata. But this is a solvable problem and I have written wrappers which will deal with file hierarchies approximately as efficiently as rsync. Here is one I developed to drive a CM system comprised of many small files most of which are unchanging: https://github.com/yahoo/cm3/tree/master/azsync

The additional process is to generate and send a list of filenames and metadata attributes (which rsync must do as well) and to invoke zsync per-file only if an update is necessary. For large trees of files which are largely unchanged this is very efficient - much moreso than fetching a zsync manifest per-file.

The file path is generally the largest amount of data sent per-file, prior to sending the zsync manifest. This is similar to rsync.