rsync being bloody slow

[Red Squirrel]

I decided to run one of my backup jobs manually just to watch the speed as I tend not to watch it as it happens in the background. I wanted to see how fast it was with my new fibre connection.

Well turns out something is holding it up, and it's not bandwidth. It seems to do 1 file at a time, VERY slowly. We're talking like KB sized files here, nothing big. For example this:

mail_ryan/mail/.imap/keep/dovecot.index.cache
email_ryan/mail/.imap/keep/dovecot.index.log
email_sysadmin/mail/.imap/INBOX/dovecot.index
email_sysadmin/mail/.imap/INBOX/dovecot.index.cache
email_sysadmin/mail/.imap/INBOX/dovecot.index.log
email_webmaster/mail/spam
ryan/.bash_history
skipping non-regular file "ryan/archived-sites"
skipping non-regular file "ryan/.kde/cache-borg.loc"
skipping non-regular file "ryan/.kde/socket-borg.loc"
skipping non-regular file "ryan/.kde/tmp-borg.loc"
ryan/Maildir/
ryan/Maildir/dovecot-uidlist
ryan/Maildir/dovecot.index
ryan/Maildir/dovecot.index.cache
ryan/Maildir/dovecot.index.log
ryan/Maildir/subscriptions
ryan/Maildir/.Trash/
ryan/Maildir/.Trash/maildirfolder
ryan/Maildir/.Trash/cur/
ryan/Maildir/.Trash/new/
ryan/Maildir/.Trash/tmp/
ryan/Maildir/cur/
ryan/Maildir/cur/1115548203.2672_0.borg:2,S
ryan/Maildir/new/


Is about 15 minutes. That's like maybe 10MB worth of files. Even the "skipping non-regular file" entries were about 2 minutes each. Why is it so slow? There's barely any network traffic going on, and rsync is not even showing up in the "top" command.