File Distribution Efficiencies: cfengine Versus rsync

This papers reports on a preliminary investigation of the performance of cfengine and rsync for file distribution for the purposes of system maintenance. It focuses on two aspects of file distribution: the transfer during an initial copy from a master server to a client, and the file verification of the client's files against the server's files. It is shown that for larger file transfers rsync performs better, while cfengine manages smaller transfers better.