I’ve been using Syncthing for the past couple of months and sync several folders across multiple desktops and laptops.
I have set rescan intervals for each folder with a slightly different value. The interval for Folders that change frequently have been set around the 300 second mark (e.g. 240, 270, 300 etc) while the inverval for folders that change less frequently have been set around the 600 seconds mark (e.g. 540, 570, 600, 630 etc.).
Will such a distribution in the rescan interval setting result in more or less cpu usage by Syncthing?
As an alternate - should I set all the frequently changing folders to sync in 300 seconds and all the less frequently changing folders in 600 seconds? Will having such fixed intervals for groups of folders result in the Syncthing daemon starting, scanning the relevant folders and stoping in one go cause less CPU usage overall?
Thank you for a really nice product.
SJ
(active Syncthing user)
In general, I’d recommend using inotify alongside “pure” syncthing, or a wrapper with filesystem watcher build in (as SyncTrayzor for windows). At least until PR #2807 is complete. It’ll watch filesystem for changes and automatically invoke scanning when changes detected. And set re-scan interval for all folders quite high, lets say 900s (15m), or higher.
That will get you immediate respond to changes with minimal resources use.
That’s what I’ve been happily doing for quite a while now.
Drawbacks (minor) - you’ll have to manually update inotify/wrapper once in a while (some wrappers can auto-update). And in general it adds one more component to the game where bugs can bite you
Thanks scienmind. I will look into inotify in a bit more detail.
I did have one observation that I wanted to share regarding my set-up. When I changed the rescan intervals to be a different value for each folder, I noticed (using psensor) that my cpu ran cooler as compared to when groups of folders were sync’d after the same interval (e.g. 60 seconds)
We try to avoid folders scanning in sync by sliding the scan interval randomly. When configured for 60s, the actual scan interval is a random number between 3/460=45 and 5/460=75 seconds.
Thanks Jacob - that is very helpful.
My take away is that setting different rescan intervals for different folders and setting the interval to the maximum time a person is comfortable with - will result is minimizing the CPU usage. Additionally Syncthing inherently does that by assigning different rescan intervals (random - within a range) if the user chooses the same rescan interval for multiple folders.
This discussion has really helped me confirm that my configuration is optimal for me.
Thanks again.
SJ
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