I just ran a series of experiments. In this case, I'm running on an old linux machine, and copying from a local disk to a nas-mounted directory. 

Using File::Copy       : 129 seconds
system("cp blah blah") : 171 seconds

[download]
Now I tried a different approach: @files is a list of the 250 files: 
my $cmd = "cd $olddirectory; tar -cvf - " . join(' ',@files) . " | gzi
+p -c -1 | (cd $newdirectory; gzip -c -d | tar -xvf -)";
system ($cmd);

Using gzip -9 : 64 seconds
Using gzip -1 : 57 seconds
Without gzips : 52 seconds

[download]
All times are for copying 250 small files amounting to 1084k. I also found that times scaled symmetrically with number of files.

For what its worth, rsync was copying at the rate of approximately 3 files per second, so the perl/tar method is much faster. (I tried perl in the first place because this directory contains 1.5 million files - rsync was taking more than a day just to collect file info...)

In this case, its apparently more necessary to minimize processing power versus network usage (otherwise gzip -9 would be faster).

As always, your mileage may vary...

In reply to Re^2: Fastest way to copy a file from 1 direcotry to another directory by Anonymous Monk
in thread Fastest way to copy a file from 1 direcotry to another directory by Anonymous Monk

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