Syncthing extremely slower than unison

[LubosKolouch]

Hello,

I am experiencing very slow syncing with syncthing (0.14.50).

I created 2 test cases to demonstrate…

Folder - 58 177 files 11 684 folder ~977 MiB Host A, Host B - both Core i3 machines with enough RAM

1. scenario “empty copy”

Host A: contains the folder Host B: empty folder

• sync run with unison: 17 seconds to scan, 1:48 to copy
• sync run with synthing: 30 seconds to scan, ??? to complete

After 15 minutes:

Global status	58 177 11 684 ~977 MiB
Local status	0 1 029 ~129 KiB
Unsynchronized	68868 položky, ~977 MiB

2. Scenario “identical copies”

Host A: contains the folder Host B: contains the same (unison-ed) folder

• sync run with unison: scan: 17 seconds, full run: 24 seconds
• sync run with syncthing: scan: 39 seconds, full run: 43% “immediately done”, then started to crawl… after 7 minutes:

Globální status	58 177 11 684 ~977 MiB
Místní status	58 177 11 684 ~977 MiB
Nesesynchronizované položky	26604 položky, ~414 MiB

WTF is going on? Why unison takes a minute and syncthing can’t finish the first sync in 15 minutes?

[calmh (Jakob Borg)]

Overhead in handling lots of teensy tiny files, would be my guess. But in general, Syncthing does something different and more complex than unison. If unison fulfils your requirements, you should use that instead.

[LubosKolouch]

OK but I must be doing something wrong then, when it takes so extremely long? It’s just less than 1G and less than 100k files…

[AudriusButkevicius]

Syncthing does a lot more work per file, plus it uses a cryptographic hash when scanning, which unison doesn’t, so it’s comparing apples with pears. If unison works for your scenario, just use it, as it will be faster.

[AudriusButkevicius]

I suggest you create a single 1gb file and then compare. Syncthing will be slow with many small files.

[LubosKolouch]

Yes, indeed.

OK, seems I will have to rethink my use case and probably use two sync tools for different folders…