I'm afraid if you want to know the answer for your needs and setup, you either have to be more specific or do your own performance (and reliability) tests. It does help to have an at least rudimentary understanding of the protocols in question and their communication, so I'd consider the articles you've been quoting a helpful resource. It also helps to know which restrictions the early inventors of these protocols faced - was their aim to keep network impact low, were they memory-starved, or did they have to count their cpu-cycles? Here's a few things to consider or answer if you want to get an answer tailored to your situation:
- OS/File System related:
- are you copying between the same OS/FS combination or do you have to worry about incompatibilities, such as file types without matching equivalent at the receiving end?
- I.e. do you have anything special to transport? Metadata, ressource forks, extended attributes, file permissions might either just not be transported by the protocol/tool of your choice, or be meaningless at the receiving end.
- The same goes for sparse files, which might end up being bloated to full size at the other end of the copy, ruining all plans you may have had about sizing.
- Physical constraints related:
- Network impact
- cpu load: nowadays, compression is much "cheaper", since modern CPUs are less challenged by the compression than those back in the times when most transfer protocols were designed.
- failure tolerance - do you need to be able to pick up where an interrupted transfer left you, or do you prefer to start anew?
- incremental transfers, or full transfers? Does an incremental transfer pose any big savings for you, or do you have full transfers by design of your task anyway? In the latter case, the added latency and memory impact to build the transfer list before starting the transfer would be a less desirable tradeoff.
- How good is the protocol at utilizing the MTU available by your underlying network protocol?
- Do you need to maintain a steady stream of data, for example to keep a tape drive streaming at the receiving end?
Lots of things to consider, and I'm sure the listing isn't even complete.
