Whats faster? Copy via nfs-mount or via scp?

Question

we have a network of several machines and we want to distribute a big directory (ca. 10 GB) to every box.

It is located on an nfs-server and is mounted on all machines, so first approach is to just use normal cp to copy the files from the mounted to a local directory. This is easy, but unfortunately there is no progress bar, because it is not intended to use it for network copies (or is it?).

Using scp is intended for copying across network, but it may encrypt everything and therefore be slow.

Should one be faster, and if so, which: cp on nfs-mount or scp?

Solution

You can always use rsync, it can show you the progress (with --progress option) and is more lightweight than scp.

You can enable compression manually with -z.

Comments

[glglgl]

That depends on the definition of "lightweight".

[Anya Shenanigans]

if you use an rsync daemon on the far side it's much lighter than scp, but most people end up using the ssh/scp based mechanism

[Durgesh Suthar]

Your answer doesn't answer OP that which is faster between cp on nfs-mount or scp.

[Piotr Zierhoffer]

@DurgeshSuthar not literally, but apparently it solved the OP's problem.