It's not just the buffer, it is the PIPE. Specifically, pipelining that streams one file after another, without an idle period of waiting for the round-trip ac

It's not just the buffer, it is the PIPE. Specifically, pipelining that streams one file after another, without an idle period of waiting for the round-trip acknowledgements of one file receipt prior to sending the next. Using rsync over ssh has the same massive benefit for transferring many files, even if there is no existing data to make use of its differential transfer mechanisms. (Those extra mechanisms are usually beneficial in WAN scenarios as well, except when you have high speed links, in which case blasting the full files may be faster than doing the IO to figure out comparisons and skip transfer.) Edited: adjusted confused punctuation.