I have installed Syncthing on my Synology DS218 DSM. Seems to work well except it randomly starts reading my disk and this pretty much happens 80% of the day. It will randomly stop but then starts few hours again.
Even if my folders are fully synced, the GUI shows no activity is happening yet I can hear my HDD constantly being noisy and resource monitor shows 100% disk utility and read speeds.
As soon as I shut off Syncthing it drops down to 0 again, I reboot Syncthing and it starts reading it again, even if I PAUSE ALL folders, Syncthing is reading. I can confirm it’s Syncthing as resource monitor shows Syncthing process reading and any shutdown of Syncthing instantly stops reading activity.
I have disabled any Watch for changes (on or off has no effect) and interval is 7Days. I have tried viewing logs via GUI, they show nothing.
How can I stop this constant reading? Is there a particular setting that Syncthing forces some updates?
What about the database? Is it located on the same storage device? If yes, then unfortunately this is how things work, and you likely won’t be able to do anything about it.
For the record, if you search the forum for https://forum.syncthing.net/search?q=database%20spin%20down, you will find quite a few threads about Syncthing preventing HDDs from spinning down, but the only solution has been to move the database to another drive.
Syncthing will update a value in the database every few minutes, that’s quite far from 100% utilisation 80% of the day. Something else is going on there I think.
The main issue is that due to the constant writing, the disk won’t be able to go idle. Usually not a big deal on solid state storage, but it can be annoying on spinning disks (and use more energy).
The actual load and performance impact should be minimal though.
Could be swap as well (very noticeable on an RS422 with 2GB RAM, the database in total is much larger than that and apparently the access pattern is quite random).