It's usable if you have a small amount of files. For anything serious (say 100k files or 500GB of data) is blows through CPU and RAM to the point of being unusable. I've been actively testing several and there is currently no actually good open-source solution in this space.
I've got about 150GB (but well over 100k files) and it only really lags on the Raspberry Pi. One thing I could suggest is that you change how often it rescans your directories for changes (I set mine to 6000 seconds versus the default 60). That might make a difference.
I've explored this pretty extensively and it's currently just the way it is. It happens from first sync so the rescan interval makes no difference. Your collection probably requires 300-400MB of RAM to sync so it should be on the cusp of failing on a raspberry pi.
Here's the bug report that was closed without any fix:
A sync tool that uses on the order 2MB of RAM per GB of files or 4kB per file isn't really usable. A cheap NAS these days can easily have 6TB of RAID6 storage but it won't have 12GB of RAM. Clearly something in syncthing is keeping way too much stuff pinned in memory and the developers so far haven't focused on that. There's no apparent need for this memory usage either as there's already an on-disk database with the state of the sync folder.
It uses inotify, so "scanning" for changes more frequently should have only a minimal impact on performance. Of course if you have a lot of actively changing files, you don't want it spending a lot of time transferring files that are still in the process of being modified, so reducing the frequency might help.
I've never noticed performance issues with syncthing, excepting my old original Nexus 7 tablet which does seem to suffer a bit due to its poor hardware. I keep my photos volume (~250GB) synchronized between three desktop systems and it's never presented a problem with those.
Given that the grandparent mentions issues with larger volumes, there may be some sort of "tipping point" beyond which performance degrades, and I just have not encountered it.
Regardless I'd encourage people to give Syncthing a try. The project is under very active development and the issue the grandparent mentions may be resovled by now, and of course that issue might be environment specific and not generally applicable.
Actually it doesn't. There are some add-ons to do it but the base tool does periodic full scans.
> I've never noticed performance issues with syncthing, excepting my old original Nexus 7 tablet which does seem to suffer a bit due to its poor hardware. I keep my photos volume (~250GB) synchronized between three desktop systems and it's never presented a problem with those.
250GB between desktops with multiple GB of RAM probably works. It will soak up plenty of resources though.
>Regardless I'd encourage people to give Syncthing a try. The project is under very active development and the issue the grandparent mentions may be resovled by now, and of course that issue might be environment specific and not generally applicable.
The issue is pervasive and apparently quite deeply rooted in the way syncthing is built as it's indeed under very active development but this hasn't improved.
Thank you for the correction re: inotify, I did not mean to mislead people. Sadly I can no longer edit the incorrect information in my original comment.
I second this. Tried to use it to sync a picture directory between my desktop and NAS device and after the original sync, it never managed to complete any further attempts. It's great for smaller directories, it's horrible at lots and lots of small to medium sized files.
