Just installed on Android 11, simply idling all day syncthing has used 20% of my batty. Is this others experience? What can I do to reduce battery use when idle?
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This will vary greatly depending on how many files you have that need to be scanned, how many devices are connected, whether you sync only on WiFi or using mobile data, etc.
If that battery usage happened on a mobile connection, then I wouldn’t really be surprised, as it does take much more effort to keep remote devices connected on a spotty network.
If you have tons of files/folders, then you may also want to make the default scan interval longer, e.g. from the default 3600 (=1h) to something like once every 12h or once a day.
Lastly, the hardware will also matter, as scanning requires much more CPU power and takes much longer on a low-end device than on a high-end one.
Interesting, this usage was on wifi. At the moment I’m only testing with a single folder between two devices. The device is a pixel 4a.
You could use the phone SyncThing app setting to only sync when connected to AC power in order to limit battery drain. If you recharge each day, then the data on your phone will be synched once per day. If you need more active synching, then this may not be a good option.
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I’m having the same problem, also with a pixel 4a. I’m syncing a single folder with <80MB of markdown files, and in the past 2-3 hours (of idling with no file changes, also on wifi) my battery dropped from full charge to 45% (battery stats confirms that syncthing is driving nearly half my battery usage). I could bite the bullet and set it to sync only on AC power, but this seems more like a bug… I’m no developer and I’m sure I don’t understand what’s under the hood of these things, but at the user level it’s a pretty stark contrast between this and other sync services like Google Drive or OneDrive that use way less power. Am I missing something here?
The last release of the Syncthing fork app added a scheduling functionality which should help here.
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Even without using that scheduling functionality, the syncthing fork app seems to have solved the issue. Thank you!
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I am curious about what syncthing fork does to have much lower battery consumption, and if it would be beneficial to Syncthing as well.
Personally, I don’t think it does anything, they both run the same binary behind the scenes, the difference between the apps is the amount of features the wrapping provides, but those features are still expressed as things that poke the same binary which does the heavy work and uses the battery.
There could be some differences in terms of the API level it’s targetting, or actual bugs in the wrapper code, but the crux of the apps is still the same.
I personally think it’s more down to when you sample or configuration of the applications (always run in the background, vs run on wifi etc).
Granted, the probably has more tweaks to control these things, which might be a contributing factor, but battery usage when apps do work should be the same.
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