I think the big difference is that if you’re using rsyncd
on the server end, instead of rsync
over ssh
, the server already knows what it has, so building the file lists to determine what needs to be transferred is much simpler. It won’t make a difference if you’re just pushing around a few files, but if you’re making, for example, CPAN available over rsync, you don’t want to have to build the file list on the source side every time.