I'd like to suggest a feature I didn't see listed but it may have been buried in a report I missed. I notice that when I emerge rsync that if the mirror that's first contacted has reached max connections that it (emerge) just drops back to the command prompt. How about capturing that error and trying another mirror? Robert
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5965 also deals with improving rsync
err, sorry, posted comment to wrong report ... but http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4874 is related to this bug ...
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9964 has a patch written by me which allows rsync to retry if it fails because of ie. too many users Any feedback appreciated.
we now have retry support in make.conf # RSYNC_RETRIES sets the number of times portage will attempt to retrieve # a current portage tree before it exits with an error. This allows # for a more successful retrieval without user intervention most times. #RSYNC_RETRIES="3"