Thanks for the reply @PaperLawyer ! Would love to hear what the transfer speed is like.
I filed a bug report after comparing Syncthing’s transfer rate to BTSync between a Linux desktop and an Odroid-C1. You can find my results here:
I have been running BTSync on many Raspberry Pi Model Bs for well over a year and they were no longer able to keep up. The Odroid-C1 easily solved the BTSync performance problems. Typical loads were 5 to 8 are now well below 1 most of the time. I’m sure the RPi2 would have also solved my problem.
I was not able to get Syncthing to work on the RPi Model B. It runs great on the Odroid-C1 although as you can see from my bug report it’s about half the speed of BTSync. This is on a LAN, I have not done speed tests over the internet yet.
The Odroid-C1 has GB Ethernet and it does not use the USB bus so for my system it’s probably a better match since I’m using USB hard disks for backup purposes. This may mean that Syncthing may be a little faster on the Odroid-C1 than on the RPi2 but I do not have an RPi2 to compare it to.
I’m still relying on BTSync for most of my backup systems. Until they fix the bug in my report the performance issue is a secondary concern.
Thanks for the info CoupeWare.
Your concern about the usb bus being used for ethernet on the pi suggests that you believe the CPU is not the bottleneck for transfer speeds for the Odroid-C1, is that the case?
Were the 20 Mbps and 40 Mbps on the Odroid or the i7 machine?
The transfers were between and Odroid-C1 and an i7 machine.
Most of my experience is with BTSync, not Syncthing. I’m not sure why Syncthing is half the speed of BTSync. I’m not sure where the bottleneck is once the CPU is no longer a problem. It does appear that Syncthing uses less CPU and RAM but I haven’t done enough testing to be sure. It just seems that using the USB bus for both network and hard disk access may slow things down. Maybe I’ll buy an RPi2 and see for myself. Some of my systems use USB WiFi adapters so the Odroid-C1 does not have an advantage there. I may setup a test with Syncthing using the WiFi adapter and compare it to the Ethernet numbers that I already have to see if the networking over the USB bus does slow things down. I’ll let you know if I do this.
I failed to mention that the USB hard disks are encrypted using LUKS / dmcrypt. This definitely adds to the CPU load with any sync operation. I first tried the dual core Banana Pi and it was better but still not great. The quad core Odroid-C1 is far better.
I think the added RAM really helps BTSync. Not sure it matters as much with Syncthing since it appears to use much less RAM.
There are many ways to compare syncing software and I only measured transfer speed over a LAN with lots of small files and a few large files. One annoyance I have with BTSync is that it sometimes takes many hours (or a day or longer) for it to start transferring files that have been added to a system which can quickly negates the transfer speed advantage. The backup systems have 2 TB of files on them so the delay may be due to the number of files. Not sure how Syncthing would deal with changes on these systems.
The Odroid-C1 meets my needs and allows me to run both BTSync and Syncthing on the same system. If Syncthing fixes my bug and seems stable enough I may start moving my cloud backup systems over to Syncthing. For now I’m just hoping BTSync doesn’t get any worse. Every upgrade seemed to slow my systems down.
I have just synced some files and I’m seeing very poor transfer rate on the GUI (using solely the gui on my NAS rather than the raspberry p iGUI) - 850 KiBs. THese are 350MB video files syncing across a wired home network.
CPU/RAM footprint has already been discussed here, and and issue opened here. To make a long story short, SyncThing is less efficient than BTSync.
Plus, having the web ui open can cause slow transfer rates.
Possibly. It also does more, at least in terms of encryption and security, and the rest we don’t know since the BTSync protocol is a black box.
The approach on the peer connection is different, but that will probably change with the version 2.0 of BTSync. BTSync is apparently implementing the same scheme, with user IDs and shares. BTSync allows encrypted nodes, as well as R/W and Read Only nodes, with is not possible with ST.
Performance wise, I assure you that BTSync is better. Wayyyyy better. Transfer rates are twice the transfer rates of ST on LAN (15-20 MB/s for ST, 40-45 MB/s for BTSync), even with good machines (Core i3 and i5). Moreover, the exchange of the entire list of files at the connection is really slowing down the sync process. For example, I have a folder with 35K files, shared with a machine outside of the LAN. At every connection, ST sends ~130 MB @ 280 kB/s just to list the files, which takes a bit less than 10 minutes.
I can live with it, ST has other interesting features, is stable, reliable, open source, secure… But it cannot compete with BTSync where scalability and performances are necessary.
see Support for file encryption (e.g. non-trusted servers) · Issue #109 · syncthing/syncthing · GitHub
see Syncing slow when web gui open · Issue #867 · syncthing/syncthing · GitHub
see Implement delta-only index exchange at connect · Issue #438 · syncthing/syncthing · GitHub
I’d love to know how you are all getting speeds that fast with Syncthing… I have it running on a Dell PowerEdge R720 with an Xeon E5-2600 and 64GB DDR4 ECC on a 1Gbit port and never gone over 25Mb/s
I’m still waiting for my Raspberry Pi 2 to arrive but I think the best way to test the Raspberry or a Computer is to eliminate the hard dive and create a ram disk on both devices so that you can fully see what other limitations there are.
I would also test the speed with compression on and off because I have a feeling that with high speed connections the compression use too much CPU power but I will see when I am running my tests
I am very happily using syncthing with the new Rp2. It runs smoothly.
Has anyone tried syncthing on the raspberry pi 3? Does it run well?
I’d also like to know how it performs on a RPi 3.
I run it on Raspberry Pi 3. It works quite good.
The top CPU utilization peak I saw was ~18% for a moment or too. Usually, it tops to ~0.7-1%.
What is the average Transfer-Rate with an RPI3?
~2.5 Mib/s on local WLAN. External connections are limited by my ISP (I have ADSL connection, which has quite slow upload speed).
2.5Mib/s seems quite slow (around 320kB/s)… Was expect higher transfer speeds.
I’m sure he means 2.5 MB/s, because even the Raspberry Pi B+ gets 600 - 700 KB/s.