rsync stalls in MacOS 15 Sequoia

I have several directories with thousands of files that I synchronize to my Mac using rsync. With Sequoia Apple has switched to a new rsync -- I can tell because the verbose output has changed. But this rsync has a bug that shows up on both Intel and Apple Silicon. This has been persistent across all versions of MacOS 15 to date, and on two different Macs.


In this case, I am transferring a large number of files, all of which are relatively small.


I execute the following command:


rsync -av [source] [destination]


The source is on a remote server.


The command will stall after transferring somewhere between 800 and about 1300 files. I did some testing using tee directed to wc to make counts. It always stalls between completing the download of one file and starting the next. I have experienced this hundreds of times now, and have never had an incomplete file. Prior to the Sequoia upgrade, a single rsync command would get all files (or all newer files) in the source with a single command. Now, it takes about 15-25 executions to get all the files (about 27,000 files), and by the time I get them all, it is time to start again because they are updated regularly. The transfer will stall forever (until killed by control-C), so it cannot be done in the background -- a human must be present to kill and restart.


Removing the -v command does not change things, except that you can't tell that the process has stalled other than by looking at the clock. The -v at least lets you see that the output has stopped.


This really needs to be fixed. A process that I used to be able to have my machine do automatically now requires extensive human interaction to complete.


MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 15.3

Posted on Mar 16, 2025 6:30 PM

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Mar 28, 2025 12:01 PM in response to Jeff Freymueller

The manual page mentions a CHOSEN_RSYNC environment variable that selects a different sync engine.


Does setting that to be “rsync_samba” instead of the default “rsync_openrsync” work for your needs?


There is discussion of this on scripting failures relating to rsync but the symptom is slightly different than yours.

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Mar 28, 2025 1:24 PM in response to Jeff Freymueller

And the bug is thus in rsync_openrsync.


One more bit of info. If there are only a few files that have changed, the rsync_openrsync version will scan through and transfer the files that have changed, with no problems. So my comments on the counts in the original post relate to the number of files transferred, not the number of files in the source directory.

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Mar 28, 2025 5:03 PM in response to Jeff Freymueller

Wonderful news. I believe this “flavor” of rsync is new to this release of macOS so the new default may be well intended and some breakage was anticipated hence the feature flag to disable the new if needed. This doesn’t seem well documented yet, only one post on Ask Different and this post here as far as I’ve seen.


There’s also some discussion that ssh keys instead of a password for auth will let either of the “flavors” work.

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rsync stalls in MacOS 15 Sequoia

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