Confused by the number of Global State items compared to those on disc

Support
1

Hi,

I’m coming to Syncthing from Resilio Sync as Resilio kept eating up RAM on my NAS to the point of it becoming unusable.

The Syncthing install went fine and I’m loving it so far.

v1.3.0 Mac v1.3.0 Linux (Synology NAS)

  • I’ve added my Remote Device (the Mac) to the Syncthing instance on the NAS
  • Created & shared a Folder at the NAS with my Mac
  • Accepted the NAS’s connection on the Mac
  • Manually started a scan in Syncthing at the Mac
  • Sync has begun between NAS & Mac

All good so far.

However the number of items being processed by Syncthing looked a bit high to me - very high in fact.

Using tree on the “source” folder at the NAS reports: 23001 directories, 183905 files

Yet the Global State of the same folder as shared by Syncthing shows this in the Syncthing UI: 23000 directories, 263823 files

Which is about the same number of directories but a much larger number of files.

Is this just me misunderstanding Syncthing or do those numbers look wrong?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Steve

2

Tree potentially doesn’t list hidden files/dirs. I believe mac creates quite a lot of them.

3

As a simple test I created another Folder with 10 files in it, placed it on the NAS and shared that with a different Mac which is also running Syncthing 1.3.0. These seems to be some duplication taking place.

In the “client” Mac I see the original 10 items that I put in my test Folder on the NAS to be sync’d, but also another fully visible folder named “@eaDir” which contains tiny representations of the original 10 items.

Curiously each “copy” of the items in the"@eaDir" directory is only 176bytes in length (compared to 135KB of the originals) and has “@SynoEAStream” appended to each filename.

The word “Syno” leads to me to think of Synology - the vendor of the NAS I’m using. Screenshot attached.

But I’m still no closer to fixing the issue… :wink:

Steve

10items
10items1064×543 150 KB

4

Progress of sorts. “ea” = ExtendedAttributes or put another way metadata relating to, but stored outside of files themselves. It’s not a feature that’s specific to Synology it’s a common filesystem property.

So my question is - how does the Syncthing community handle them?

As it stands each file will have a corresponding “@ea” file associated with it, meaning double the number of files that get sync’d (albeit they’re tiny).

Is it just something I have to live with? It didn’t seem to surface with Resilio Sync afaicr.

Thanks,

Steve

5

I suggest you ignore those files/dirs: https://docs.syncthing.net/users/ignoring.html

6

Thanks.

I did wonder about that - but wasn’t sure how vital this metaData in the extendedAttributes is. Having examined a few of them it doesn’t seem very informative.

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