At LAN parties we used to share our SteamApps folders so that others could copy games across. Interestingly (perhaps due to Windows networking handling copy-many-small-files poorly?) it was often faster to make an uncompressed ZIP of the files, copy that over the network, and unzip it on the other side.
Great to see that the steam client now does all this transparently.
All file transfer protocols that copy files one by one suffer work poorly with many small files. The more latency you have, the worst the slowdown. rsync is great for this purpose because it can do batch transfer efficiently, including compressing the data on the fly.
neurostimulant|3 years ago