Using rsync 3.1.1 (or HEAD) and sshfs (2.5) under ubuntu is really slow over the internet.

Rsync via ssh or scp without sshfs involved is fine.

An strace shows rsync doing lots of lstats and chmods, and not bothering to transmit most of the time when those are happening.

Reducing all of those remote checks with things like --whole-file and --no-owner improves the situation, but it still spends most of its time querying the remote file system, and little time transmitting.

The reason I'm not using rsync's ssh transport is that I'm using encfs to create a virtual local file system so that I don't have to have double the disk space to build a local copy of everything for an encrypted remote mirror.

Has anybody got a reasonable setup with rsync and sshfs working quickly?

Well, sshfs is an emulated filesystem over sftp. Rsync is normally run as rsync protocol (which MUST do a lit of checksum and metadata checking) generally over ssh (originally over rsh). Sshfs was designed for convenience when better solutions are not available, it is not known for global efficiency. Running rsync in local mode strips out the ssh piece, but you are still layering a lot of communication protocol into a tower of inelegance.

I would recommend running rsync between native storage locations to avoid redundant layering. Run that way it seems fast and elegant, though performance may not scale elegantly. If you must involve the sshfs storage, there may be a tool more suited to your goal.

Detail on that goal, and what you are REALLY trying to accomplish, MIGHT help some of us make some targeted recommendations. (Of course, it also might not, but we can only try.)

This is a duplicate post - more detail in this thread. Reporting this for closure.

My initial response was also "too many moving pieces" - especially with fuse involved (at least) twice. I used sshfs years ago, and IIRC I dropped it because of performance.