[ALUG] Why is rsync forking copies of itself?

[Chris G]

On Mon, Dec 10, 2007 at 01:44:36PM +0000, Phil Ashby wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-12-10 at 12:39 +0000, Chris G wrote:
> > I'm running some backups using rsync, it seems to be spawning multiple
> > copies of itself:-
> > 
> >     root      4426  4424  1 11:24 ?        00:01:14 rsync -rqt --size-only /home /freecom/backup
> >     root      4427  4426  0 11:24 ?        00:00:01 rsync -rqt --size-only /home /freecom/backup
> >     root      4429  4427  4 11:24 ?        00:02:53 rsync -rqt --size-only /home /freecom/backup
> > 
> > Why is it doing this?  .... and *should* it be doing this as all three
> > copies of rsync appear to be doing exactly the same thing.
> 
> Most likely this is rsync creating worker threads during I/O operations,
> which under linux appear as separate processes. They *appear* to be
> doing the same thing but you can't tell unless you connect a debugger to
> each and take a stack trace :)
> 
Yes, I guess it must be something like that. Trouble is that they're
taking far too long and don't finish before then next one starts (24
hours later) and then we've really lost it!

-- 
Chris Green