Hi! I’m using the latest version of syncthing on windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 14.04. I have a few repos that are not super big but contain a lot of files. The repos range in size from 5-30 gigs. When I add one of these folders and it starts indexing and sending the files(I’m syncing from windows --> Linux) my windows desktop becomes just about useless. Syncthing is pegging the disk io which affects all other apps. Simply opening something like notepad.exe takes upto 5mins.
The windows machine is pretty beefy. Quad encore Xeon @3.2Ghz with HT and 16 gigs of memory. The hard drive is just a sata 250 gig drive.
I do understand that the initial indexing/syncing is fairly intensive, but I did not expect it to be this bad. I hate to be one of those guys who says “but this worked with x software”, but in this case I have used several other apps to sync these same folders(Dropbox, btsync, crash plan,google drive, and sky drive) all apps do impact the system performance, but with the others I could at least browse the web while syncing.
Is these anything I can do to help out? Is there anyway to have syncthing be nicer on windows? Something like nice/ionice on Linux?
Syncthing reads and hashes files as fast as possible on startup. On the other hand, this is a one time thing and should be over in a few minutes unless that disk of yours is exceedingly slow?
It’s an older sata drive but it shouldnt be excessively slow. The main repos it has issues with are full of code I’ve written. Including git repos that contain a bunch of small files and some web projects using node which have a ton of small files nested in node_modules and so on.
I’ve been struggling with this exact issue these last days. It didn’t last a few minutes as suggested, but almost 2 days non stop. I had decided not to turn the computer off, supposing it was the initial indexing of a few repos (roughly 100GB). But I finally had to revert to my initial config: Syncthing for “small syncs” (like camera sync from Android to PC and Android to NAS) and BTSync for bigger ones (like Music folder and work database between PC and NAS).
Waiting either for a solution, or for better days. Wish I could contribute, but I’m a total noob when it comes to coding.
PS: I have a rather “decent” hardware: Lenovo IdeaPad 14 Flex. No issue with the HDD so far.
As Harlok Ewald suggested using the command:
start “Syncthing” /low d:\syncthing\syncthing.exe
seems to have helped out a bit. It just runs syncthing with the lowest priority, meaning other applications get treated better. It’s worth a shot.
Also It took a VERY long time for my indexing to complete. It also reported MUCH MORE space then what was actually being backed up. I just let it run and do it’s thing and it eventually completed the initial sync and since then disk io/cpu usage is at a much more reasonable level.