pdiffcopy 1.0.1

Fast large file synchronization inspired by rsync

The pdiffcopy program synchronizes large binary data files between Linux servers at blazing speeds by performing delta transfers and spreading its work over many CPU cores. It’s currently tested on Python 2.7, 3.5+ and PyPy (2.7) on Ubuntu Linux but is expected to work on most Linux systems.

• Status

• Installation

• Command line

• Benchmarks

  • Low concurrency

  • High concurrency

  • Silly concurrency

• Limitations

• History

• About the name

• Contact

• License

Status

Although the first prototype of pdiffcopy was developed back in June 2019 it wasn’t until March 2020 that the first release was published as an open source project.

Note

This is an alpha release, meaning it’s not considered mature and you may encounter bugs. As such, if you’re going to use pdiffcopy, I would suggest you to keep backups, be cautious and sanity check your results.

There are lots of features and improvements I’d love to add but more importantly the project needs to actually be used for a while before I’ll consider changing the alpha label to beta or mature.

Installation

The pdiffcopy package is available on PyPI which means installation should be as simple as:

$ pip install 'pdiffcopy[client,server]'

There’s actually a multitude of ways to install Python packages (e.g. the per user site-packages directory, virtual environments or just installing system wide) and I have no intention of getting into that discussion here, so if this intimidates you then read up on your options before returning to these instructions 😉.

The names between the square brackets (client and server) are called “extras” and they enable you to choose whether to install the client dependencies, server dependencies or both.

Command line

Usage: pdiffcopy [OPTIONS] [SOURCE, TARGET]

Synchronize large binary data files between Linux servers at blazing speeds by performing delta transfers and spreading the work over many CPU cores.

One of the SOURCE and TARGET arguments is expected to be the pathname of a local file and the other argument is expected to be a URL that provides the location of a remote pdiffcopy server and a remote filename. File data will be read from SOURCE and written to TARGET.

If no positional arguments are given the server is started.

Supported options:

Option	Description
-b, --block-size=BYTES	Customize the block size of the delta transfer. Can be a plain integer number (bytes) or an expression like 5K, 1MiB, etc.
-m, --hash-method=NAME	Customize the hash method of the delta transfer (defaults to ‘sha1’ but supports all hash methods provided by the Python hashlib module).
-W, --whole-file	Disable the delta transfer algorithm (skips computing of hashing and downloads all blocks unconditionally).
-c, --concurrency=COUNT	Change the number of parallel block hash / copy operations.
-n, --dry-run	Scan for differences between the source and target file and report the similarity index, but don’t write any changed blocks to the target.
-B, --benchmark=COUNT	Evaluate the effectiveness of delta transfer by mutating the TARGET file (which must be a local file) and resynchronizing its contents. This process is repeated COUNT times, with varying similarity. At the end an overview is printed.
-l, --listen=ADDRESS	Listen on the specified IP:PORT or PORT.
-v, --verbose	Increase logging verbosity (can be repeated).
-q, --quiet	Decrease logging verbosity (can be repeated).
-h, --help	Show this message and exit.

Benchmarks

The command line interface provides a simple way to evaluate the effectiveness of the delta transfer implementation and compare it against rsync. The tables in the following sections are based on that benchmark.

• Low concurrency

• High concurrency

• Silly concurrency

Low concurrency

Concurrency:

6 processes on 4 CPU cores

Disks:

Magnetic storage (slow)

Filesize:

1.79 GiB

The following table shows the results of the benchmark on a 1.79 GiB datafile that’s synchronized between two bare metal servers that each have four CPU cores and spinning disks, where pdiffcopy was run with a concurrency of six [1]:

Delta	Data size	pdiffcopy	rsync
10%	183 MiB	3.20 seconds	38.55 seconds
20%	366 MiB	4.15 seconds	44.33 seconds
30%	549 MiB	5.17 seconds	49.63 seconds
40%	732 MiB	6.09 seconds	53.74 seconds
50%	916 MiB	6.99 seconds	57.49 seconds
60%	1.07 GiB	8.06 seconds	1 minute and 0.97 seconds
70%	1.25 GiB	9.06 seconds	1 minute and 2.38 seconds
80%	1.43 GiB	10.12 seconds	1 minute and 4.20 seconds
90%	1.61 GiB	10.89 seconds	1 minute and 3.80 seconds
100%	1.79 GiB	12.05 seconds	1 minute and 4.14 seconds

[1]

Allocating more processes than there are CPU cores available can make sense when the majority of the time spent by those processes is waiting for I/O (this definitely applies to pdiffcopy).

High concurrency

Concurrency:

10 processes on 48 CPU cores

Disks:

NVMe (fast)

Filesize:

5.5 GiB

Here’s a benchmark based on a 5.5 GB datafile that’s synchronized between two bare metal servers that each have 48 CPU cores and high-end NVMe disks, where pdiffcopy was run with a concurrency of ten:

Delta	Data size	pdiffcopy	rsync
10%	562 MiB	4.23 seconds	49.96 seconds
20%	1.10 GiB	6.76 seconds	1 minute and 2.38 seconds
30%	1.65 GiB	9.43 seconds	1 minute and 13.73 seconds
40%	2.20 GiB	12.41 seconds	1 minute and 19.67 seconds
50%	2.75 GiB	14.54 seconds	1 minute and 25.86 seconds
60%	3.29 GiB	17.21 seconds	1 minute and 26.97 seconds
70%	3.84 GiB	19.79 seconds	1 minute and 27.46 seconds
80%	4.39 GiB	23.10 seconds	1 minute and 26.15 seconds
90%	4.94 GiB	25.19 seconds	1 minute and 21.96 seconds
100%	5.43 GiB	27.82 seconds	1 minute and 19.17 seconds

This benchmark shows how well pdiffcopy can scale up its performance by running on a large number of CPU cores. Notice how the smaller the delta is, the bigger the edge is that pdiffcopy has over rsync? This is because pdiffcopy computes the differences between the local and remote file using many CPU cores at the same time. This operation requires only reading, and that parallelizes surprisingly well on modern NVMe disks.

Silly concurrency

Concurrency:

20 processes on 48 CPU cores

Disks:

NVMe (fast)

Filesize:

5.5 GiB

In case you looked at the high concurrency benchmark above, noticed the large number of CPU cores available and wondered whether increasing the concurrency further would make a difference, this section is for you 😉. Having taken the effort of developing pdiffcopy and enabling it to run on many CPU cores I was curious myself so I reran the high concurrency benchmark using 20 processes instead of 10. Here are the results:

Delta	Data size	pdiffcopy	rsync
10%	562 MiB	3.80 seconds	49.71 seconds
20%	1.10 GiB	6.25 seconds	1 minute and 3.37 seconds
30%	1.65 GiB	8.90 seconds	1 minute and 12.40 seconds
40%	2.20 GiB	11.44 seconds	1 minute and 19.57 seconds
50%	2.75 GiB	14.21 seconds	1 minute and 25.43 seconds
60%	3.29 GiB	16.45 seconds	1 minute and 28.12 seconds
70%	3.84 GiB	19.05 seconds	1 minute and 28.34 seconds
80%	4.39 GiB	21.95 seconds	1 minute and 25.49 seconds
90%	4.94 GiB	24.60 seconds	1 minute and 22.27 seconds
100%	5.43 GiB	26.42 seconds	1 minute and 18.73 seconds

As you can see increasing the concurrency from 10 to 20 does make the benchmark a bit faster, however the margin is so small that it’s hardly worth bothering. I interpret this to mean that the NVMe disks on these servers can be more or less saturated using 8–12 writer processes.

Note

In the end the question is how many CPU cores it takes to saturate your storage infrastructure. This can be determined through experimentation, which the benchmark can assist with. There are no fundamental reasons why 30 or even 50 processes couldn’t work well, as long as your storage infrastructure can keep up…

Limitations

While inspired by rsync the goal definitely isn’t feature parity with rsync. Right now only single files can be transferred and only the file data is copied, not the metadata. It’s a proof of concept that works but is limited. While I’m tempted to add support for synchronization of directory trees and file metadata just because its convenient, it’s definitely not my intention to compete with rsync in the domain of synchronizing large directory trees, because I would most likely fail.

Error handling is currently very limited and interrupting the program using Control-C may get you stuck with an angry pool of multiprocessing workers that refuse to shut down 😝. In all seriousness, hitting Control-C a couple of times should break out of it, otherwise try Control-\ (that’s a backslash, it should send a QUIT signal).

History

In June 2019 I found myself in a situation where I wanted to quickly synchronize large binary datafiles (a small set of very large MySQL *.ibd files totaling several hundred gigabytes) using the abundant computing resources available to me (48 CPU cores, NVMe disks, bonded network interfaces, you name it 😉).

I spent quite a bit of time experimenting with running many rsync processes in parallel, but the small number of very large files was “clogging up the pipe” so to speak, no matter what I did. This was how I realized that rsync was a really poor fit, which was a disappointment for me because rsync has long been one my go-to programs for ad hoc problem solving on Linux servers 🙂.

In any case I decided to prove to myself that the hardware available to me could do much more than what rsync was getting me and after a weekend of hacking on a prototype I had something that could outperform rsync even though it was written in Python and used HTTP as a transport 😁. During this weekend I decided that my prototype was worthy of being published as an open source project, however it wasn’t until months later that I actually found the time to do so.

About the name

The name pdiffcopy is intended as a (possibly somewhat obscure) abbreviation of “Parallel Differential Copy”:

• Parallel because it’s intended run on many CPU cores.

• Differential because of the delta transfer mechanism.

But mostly I just needed a short, unique name like rsync so that searching for this project will actually turn up this project instead of a dozen others 😇.

Contact

The latest version of pdiffcopy is available on PyPI and GitHub. The documentation is hosted on Read the Docs and includes a changelog. For bug reports please create an issue on GitHub. If you have questions, suggestions, etc. feel free to send me an e-mail at [e-mail].

License

This software is licensed under the MIT license.

© 2020 Peter Odding.