Efficiency with large directories

I am using Sitecopy to backup large directories from FreeBSD to a  
Xythos server (a WebDAV server).

I started running Sitecopy last night, and noticed that nearly 8  
hours later it hadn't started uploading files. This is a large  
directory (67 GB in 452,000 files over 95,000 directories), so it  
doesn't surprise me that it takes a while, but it does surprise me  
that it doesn't do some of the directory-walking and uploading in  
parallel (since these block on separate I/O devices), and it also  
surprises me that it takes that long to walk the tree at all (since  
'find $DIR -type f' takes about 4 minutes to complete, as does mtree,  
which reads out more metadata than Sitecopy does).

'sitecopy --debug files' shows that it is mostly obtaining metadata  
from the files, and strace seems to verify this (at least for about  
the first ten minutes, I haven't let it run for hours with any debug  
flags, maybe that is the next step)

Is Sitecopy just not designed for directories this large, or am I  
doing something wrong?
I'm doing the initial population of the directory in pieces, but will  
the updates still take greater than eight hours to complete, even if  
little has changed? (on average, 650MB over 7,000 files per update)

Here is my .sitecopyrc:

site XXX
   server XXX
   remote /XXX
   local /XXX
   username XXX
   password XXX
   url https://XXX
   protocol webdav
   http secure
   http expect
   tempupload

-- David
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