Sync many files slow ? Android11

So I’ve go seven devices, on a variety of platforms (Win10, MacOS, Ubuntu20LTS, Android 10&11), all syncing a number of folders, one of which has upwards of 30k small files. It’s a Joplin source directory structure, so lots of markdown text files and a bunch of resource files of varying types. All of that works beautifully, apart from the Android 11 device, a Samsung Galaxy S20U 5g. It is running Syncthing-fork (I moved to fork as the stock version had the same issue and I wondered whether fork could resolve) at 1.12.n.
Symptom is that devices other than the Android 11 will sync the lot beautifully in a very normal period (couple of hours?); A11 has been running now for several days and still has ~25k files to sync (~620MiB). I’ve tried to get it working three previous times: stock syncthing 1.12 and 1.13; now with -fork 1.12, all with the same symptoms: the sync starts at ‘normal’ pace, and then gradually slows to effectively a standstill over a couple of few days. The most interesting comparison is of course between the Android 11 Samsung Galaxy S20U and the Samsung Galaxy S10 running Android 10. Both have identical folder structure and config / .stignore etc., but A11 runs as you’d expect. I’ve looked for anyone else apparently experiencing the same issue to no avail; I’ve seen of course the discussions over All File Storage, but this doesn’t appear to be directly related. Does anyone else have an Android 11 device syncing 25+k small files with no problem? If you do, I need to keep looking!

Did you check the web UI for any clues/issues? And then in the next step logs?

Hi Simon, thanks for responding. I’ve been looking at the logs, but can’t see any obvious errors; things are happening, just appears slowly. As I write this, there are now ~17k files left (~455MiB), so maybe 8k files in 16 hours? As I say, there are all pretty small. Do you know which of the WebGUI ‘logging facilities’ would be mostly involved in this apparently extended ‘scanning/syncing’ phase? There’s quite a lot of this action: 15:15:52W/SyncthingNativeCode 2021/02/25 05:15:52 broadcastBeacon: Failed service ‘Service@0x40000485c0 created by broadcastBeacon@0x40001b60f0/writer’ (1.000000 failures of 2.000000), restarting: true, error: route ip+net: netlinkrib: permission denied

Seems to be going along at about 1 file every 2 seconds currently?

Could this be related to the changes that Samsung seems to have made in Android 11?

Good call, but I don’t think so. I’ve certainly double checked that it is ‘Not optimised’.

Each file is fsynced after transfer, which might take a few seconds, so that might cause slowness if you have a lot of small files.

I wonder why there seems to be such a marked difference between the Android 10 Galaxy S10 and the Android 11 Galaxy S20? I should probably wipe the 10 and get a comparison. Anyway - appreciate you taking the time to think about it!

I think I’m seeing this issue too on a Samsung Galaxy s10 after upgrading to Android 11. For me, it’s not the file transfer process that’s slow, but the scanning process.

I have a Send Only folder on my PC with ~10k files, 90 GB (MP3s) and a Receive Only folder on my phone’s SD card.

Each time SyncThing goes through the scanning process (which seems to be when starting the app and at the end of the transfer process), it takes around 20+ minutes. It takes longer if the app is in the background or if the device’s screen is off. Before updating, the process was relatively quick: probably 30 seconds or less.

In the logs, I see “Folder […] isn’t making sync progress - retrying in #m#ss”. Not sure where else to look for information.

My SyncThing app is not battery optimized either.

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I tried using a folder on my phone’s internal storage, and that doesn’t have the same issue as I described. Seems like it’s tied to the SD card storage. I haven’t found much on this, but this Reddit comment seems like a similar issue.

I’m not sure if I’m having the same issue as the OP.

So I’m not using the SD card, but that discussion is really interesting - I’d not read that before. Feels like it could be the new security layer. Update is that the folder is now up to date, after several days; I guess I just have to hope that the files themselves are sufficiently static that keeping up to date is no drama.

As you can see in the last comment w/ the screenshot of this post:

OP 8pro is my Android 11 smartphone!

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