rsync suddenly hanging indefinitely during transfers

Question

For the past few years, I have been using an rsync one-liner to back up important folders on my Mac Mini desktop (OSX 10.9, 2.5 GHz i5, 4 GB RAM) to a FreeNAS box (0.7.2 Sabanda

Answer 1

I am using openSUSE 13.2 Linux, rsync version 3.1.1-2.4.1.x86_64, and I experienced similar problems, doing an rsync between my laptop and an external hard disk, with the destination device definitively having enough free space.

I thought I got an improvement omitting option -v, but after 10 minutes it was hanging again: strace said: select(5, [], [4], [], {60, 0}) = 0 (Timeout)

And with "iotop" I counld see confirm that the rsync processes did no significant disk IO any more.

Neither removing the -v option nor limiting the bandwidth using --bwlimit fixed the problem.