I am using syncthing to transfer files between my Windows 10 PC and my Redmi Note 9s (Arrowos, android 11) smartphone. I have access to a WiFi network (but not on its router, settings etc.), and I can create a hotspot on my smartphone (cellular data enabled) and connect to it from my pc. On syncthing settings on both my devices, I have tried disabling all other connection types (NAT,Global,Local,Relaying) and keeping only one open at each time. Now I just left local on. Also I tried completely disabling windows firewall. Anyway, no matter what, my transfer speeds did not exceed 2 MB/s. From what I read I understand transfer speeds could be much more than this, so how can I achieve that with the conditions I described preferably without the WiFi network involved. Thank you in advance!
Did you check the suggestions in the FAQ? If yes, what did you try?
Well, I made sure I am not connected through a relay, I turned off my firewall, and checked that my CPU is not heavily used on both my machines. Otherwise, I don’t know what else i should check or try.
Could you check which kind of connection gets established(tcp/quic/relay) and which ip address is used in the connection.
Ideally syncthing should by able to open a direct TCP connection between both LAN IPs.
On web gui/remote devices/PC(my connected windows 10 PC device)/address, there is an IP address 1**.1**.1**.*28:22000 labeled as tcp-server TLS1.3-TLS AES 128 GCM SHA 256. On my PC web GUI there is a similar IP address about my smartphone labeled the same. I guess this answers what you asked.
Have you benchmarked the connection/link outside of syncthing to see if anything more than 2MB/s is feasible?
Well, I tested my internet connection on my PC while connected on smartphones hotspot, on speedtest.net, and I get 15 MB/s download and 8MB/s upload, but I guess it is limited by my cellular data provider. Is there a more legit way to check what you ask or is this information enough? Edit: it looks like there is some limitation on the hotspot connection, since on my smartphone I get 40MB/s download and about the same (8MB/s) upload speed on speedtest.net. So, that means this is the fastest I can transfer files through these devices wirelessly?
I am not sure if speedtest is a fair test, as that doesn’t test the speed between the devices, but it tests the speed between the device and speedtest servers.
I am not really sure what to suggest, as one of the devices os a phone where conventional tools are simply not available.
I guess, you can try and configure device addresses manually by using lan ip addresses and see if that has any positive change.
Thanks anyway for your help! Can you explain a bit more about this last suggestion about lan IP addresses? How to do that? You mean change “dynamic” on connected devices advanced settings, with tcp://(the ip I wrote you earlier):22000?
Also, as a conclusion: 1)from what I told you it seems I am connected on direct connection? 2)does my cellular data providers upload or download speed affect my smartphone-PC (direct?) connection through hotspot speed? 3)From your experience what should be a normal transfer speed through hotspot connection on these circumstances?
Please make sure that you’re not confusing Mbit/s (Megabits per second) and MB/s (Megabytes per second).
2 MB/s = 16 Mbit/s, which is really close to your “15 MB/s” if you swap the units. Speedtests very often measure in bits, not bytes. Are you sure you’re talking about bytes and not bits?
I am sorry, you are right. I checked again: speedtest measures now 20 Mbps download and 11 Mbps upload, and syncthing transfers at 2.5-3 MiB/s. Ok, I guess then that I can’t do something to improve my connection speed. Thank you and AudriusButkevicius for your time, and sorry if I misused it.
Some additional suggestions:
- This review for your device (Xiaomi Redmi Note 9S test / review (detailed and unbiaised)) talks about speeds of download 150Mbps Upload: 60Mbps, when connecting to a 4G network. With a good wifi network the review reports 200Mbit/s.
Something definitely is up, but if you can’t access your routers settings, i am not sure what could be done. Excuse my naive question: Are there walls in between the router and your devices? If yes, get rid of them xD
- You wrote that you connected your pc to your phone via hotspot. To answer your question:
does my cellular data providers upload or download speed affect my smartphone-PC (direct?) connection through hotspot speed?
Yes, ideally, hotspotspeed of your pc = the speed of your mobile phone when connected, BUT if you use wifi or bluetooth, the speed is usually a little less than on the mobile phone because of package loss and overhead. If possible, you might wanna try to connect via cable instead of wifi/bluetooth, that actually could improve the hotspot speed. Worked for me before. Not sure if Syncthing will work in that kind of setup though.
Well, I do have access on a WiFi network but I chose not to connect to it because of its kind of poor signal (we share it with neighbours so I don’t want to ruin their walls xD).I shouldn’t mention it at all. The speed measurings I made and discussed above, were made on my PC while connected on a hotspot network created on my smartphone, and my smartphone was connected to the internet through cellular data. You think the same connection speeds you found on this review should apply on the hotspot? Meaning the smarthpone should share data with my PC at least with its upload speeds 60Mbit/s, or it doesn’t work like that? Also, is there any other possible way to connect my smartphone with my PC without the need of a router? (ps. I also tried it the other way around, creating a hotspot on my PC and connecting my smartphone to it. PC was connected on the WiFi network I mentioned. I had the same speeds on syncthing, maybe a little slower.)
You could try to add a Wifi repeater. This should greatly improve your connection speeds if placed properly. e.g at the outermost room facing your neighbours so that the repeater can pick up a strong signal.
But i’d talk to them first before setting this up.
Yes, I thought of it, maybe I invest on this idea sometime.
It depends. In your current setting, your smartphone could theoretically reach 60 Mbit/s Uploadspeed IF your connection to the internet is fast enough. So i don’t think your phone is the bottleneck, but who knows?
It could be many things. E.g.:
- Your internetservice provider limits your mobilenetworkspeed (e.g. because of contract)
- Your internetservice provider limits your neighbours internetspeed that you then connect to via wifi. You could ask them, what is the maximum speed that is covered in their contract.
- Coverage issues for you mobilephones network (you live far from next celltower; do you connect via UMTS, LTE, G4, G5 etc.? All these provide different speeds)
- Coverage issues for your neighbours internet (no fibre-cables in your house; long distance to next connectionpoint of your internetserviceprovider)
- Long distance and walls between router and your devices reduces speed
- many neighbouring networks and electronic devices interfere with your wifi signals. (i often had connection issues when my brother used his playstations bluetooth connection for the controllers. It crashed our wifi).
- Drivers on your computer are outdated and bugged. Try to install up to date ones. Firmware of your router could be outdates. Update.
- Your computers network card supports limited wifi speed. check the datasheet of the manufacturer. If it is an old one it could be that it only supports 54 Mbit/s.
- Connection between your phone and your computer (the hotspot) is not really good. Use cable instead of bluetooth or wifi between those.
- router settings
- …
If you share the internet with your neighbours, i would try to find out what is the maximum speed for them. If it is substantially faster for them than for you, it probably is the distance, the walls or something else on your end. Before you install a repeater, an option could be to analyze the network with “Wifianalyzer” (WiFiAnalyzer | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository) to find out the best location for it and your other devices.
Thanks, it probably is due to the internet providers speed limitations both for the neighbours WiFi network and my smartphones cellular data provider. I just thought that on the direct connection between my smartphone and my PC it wouldnt matter as it seemed like no data was transmitted to the web/internet. I got that impression because my cellular data provider did not bill me any data usage when I transfered via syncthing, so I thought that the hotspot connection/transfer speed between PC-smartphone would not have something to do with the cellular data provider speeds, unless I tried to connect to the web/internet. I thought it was plain direct transfer from one device to the other, localy, that could be acomplished even if my router for example was not connected to Ethernet cable, or in this situation if I had no service from the provider.
But I am getting to a conclusion that since when I test my cellular data internet connection on my smartphone and it has download speed around 40 Mbps and upload speed around 8 Mbps, while the internet connection speed on my PC, when it is connected to the cellular data via my smarthpones hotspot, is 20 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload, that my hotspot connection is somehow the bottleneck? Although it does not make much sense to be limited to these speeds with modern WiFi equipment. From what I read given speed values on smartphones WiFi and my Wireless network card are quite higher than that. Unless I got it wrong about the direct connection and how it is affected by the cellular providers speed limits.
So far most of this thread is talking about network speeds. This is only one of the possible bottlenecks. To sync a file Syncthing needs to read, write and process the database data, read the file from storage, encrypt it, transfer it over the network, then at the other end process and save database data, decrypt and save to storage. You are never going to get your network’s real-world speed through Syncthing.
The phone could have slower and/or worn flash storage, poor encryption performance, could hitting Syncthing with battery/CPU management, or the PC could have slow storage, slow CPU, could be busy with other tasks, storage I/O, or anti-virus or third-party firewall could be slowing things down.
Without knowing how fast the phone and computer can perform these tasks it’s difficult to suggest how to improve your speed. The Syncthing log will give you an encryption speed test when it starts up. Storage benchmarking tools will tell you how fast read/writes are on the storage on your devices. You’ve given no specs on your phone or computer so we’re in the dark as to how performant they are.
Yes, you are right. Your internet providers speed limitations should in theory only limit a connection to devices outside of your local network.
And yes, i second Adam 