Speed up rsync with Simultaneous/Concurrent File Transfers?

Updated answer (Jan 2020)

xargs is now the recommended tool to achieve parallel execution. It's pre-installed almost everywhere. For running multiple rsync tasks the command would be:

ls /srv/mail | xargs -n1 -P4 -I% rsync -Pa % myserver.com:/srv/mail/

This will list all folders in /srv/mail, pipe them to xargs, which will read them one-by-one and and run 4 rsync processes at a time. The % char replaces the input argument for each command call.

Original answer using parallel:

ls /srv/mail | parallel -v -j8 rsync -raz --progress {} myserver.com:/srv/mail/{}

rsync transfers files as fast as it can over the network. For example, try using it to copy one large file that doesn't exist at all on the destination. That speed is the maximum speed rsync can transfer data. Compare it with the speed of scp (for example). rsync is even slower at raw transfer when the destination file exists, because both sides have to have a two-way chat about what parts of the file are changed, but pays for itself by identifying data that doesn't need to be transferred.

A simpler way to run rsync in parallel would be to use parallel. The command below would run up to 5 rsyncs in parallel, each one copying one directory. Be aware that the bottleneck might not be your network, but the speed of your CPUs and disks, and running things in parallel just makes them all slower, not faster.

run_rsync() {    # e.g. copies /main/files/blah to /main/filesTest/blah    rsync -av "$1" "/main/filesTest/${1#/main/files/}"}export -f run_rsyncparallel -j5 run_rsync ::: /main/files/*

You can use xargs which supports running many processes at a time. For your case it will be:

ls -1 /main/files | xargs -I {} -P 5 -n 1 rsync -avh /main/files/{} /main/filesTest/