Really this section is only of theoretical value. The relevant difference between zsync and rsync is that rsync requires special server support, and uses this to enable a richer data transfer, with file permissions, tunnelling over SSH, etc. Whereas zsync can be used with no active server support. But it is interesting to compare the effect that this has on their data transfer abilities.
zsync incurs overheads due to HTTP headers. rsync must wrap the data in its own protocol, but has presumably chosen an efficient protocol for this purpose. rsync also has the overhead of rsh, ssh or whatever protocol it uses to talk to rsyncd with, but again this will be rather smaller than the overhead for HTTP.
More interesting is the difference caused by the metadata being downloaded, instead of uploaded. rsync can transmit the weak checksums to the server, and the server then requests only the needed strong checksums, saving on their transmission (I have not checked that this optimisation is actually implemented by rsync). zsync cannot easily do this: while we could separate the weak checksums, so the client could download only those, and then selectively retrieve strong checksums from the server, in practice selective retrieval of strong checksums is not efficient when we have only HTTP Range: requests to work with — each distinct range carries an overhead, as seen above.
More interestingly, with rsync the bulk of the metadata (checksums) travels upstream (from client to server) and only minimal metadata comes downstream with the file data. zsync must download the metadata. As the developers of Bittorrent have noted, the client's upstream bandwidth is usually free [[BitT2003]], whereas downstream bandwidth is the bottleneck — thus rsync's upstream traffic is negligible in many practical situations. Surprisingly, rsync makes relatively little use of this: empirically, rsync seems to default to quite large blocksizes if the data files being transferred are large, which tends to result in less data uploaded and more downloaded. But rsync and similar protocols do benefit from good bidirectional use of bandwidth (see for example [[CVSup1999]]).