Indexing makes PC unusable (CPU?!)

[klues]

hi,

i have version 2.3.6 (378) of btsync running and i have the problem, that indexing somehow needs too much resources of my pc. directly after start of btsync task manager shows relatively high cpu consumtion of btsync (about 30%) - see "processes.png". however, the pc works fine at this moment. the strange thing is, that after about a minute cpu usage of btsync drops to about 5% (see "processes2.png"), but now the pc is becoming nearly unusable. all reactions are very slow and e.g. videos in browser are hardly working anymore. if i stop btsync, then after some moments everything is fine again.

"cpu.png" shows the chart of cpu usage. the first part, where the line is relatively flat, is the part where the pc is hardly working anymore (50% usage, although in processes btsync is only ~5% -> but somehow anyway its btsyncs fault). the drop of the usage in the chart occurs, if i terminate btsync.

"settings.png" shows my advanced settings of btsync - i already tried some things like changing "folder_rescan_interval" to a higher value or "disk_low_priority" to true.

my system:
win 10 64bit
intel core i5 m 520
8GB RAM

i would be very thankful if you could help me with this very strange problem! if you need some logfiles or more infos, please let me know.

thanks!
 

[RomanZ]

@klues Did you restart Sync after setting "disk_low_priority" to true? According to your description HDD is the bottleneck here. Also, how many folders and files you Sync in total?

[klues]

hi, sorry for my late response!

yes, i restarted Sync after setting "disk_low_priority" to true. in fact i have set this value for a long time, because i always had these kinds of performance issuses with Sync.

the folders i am syncing are quite big, about 350GB and 150 000 files. therefore i understand that the indexing takes some time, but why can't it be at a lower priority and therefore not making my pc unusable in the meantime? all the synced files are on a HDD, while the system is on a SSD, therefore i also do not understand why the HDD operations should make the pc so slow.

its interesting, that the times the pc becomes so slow, is when there is exactly 50% processor usage in taskmanager. when i stop Sync the the usage drops immediately, like shown on the attached image.

thanks in advance for any further tips!

[spivoler]

Just similar problem I am encountering right now.  CPU usage frequently goes to ~30% even though the uploading speed is only 20KB/s (a lot of small files).

I dig a bit and an old thread said that older version of btsync has no such issue. See here:

I tried 2.2.7 and the CPU usage did go down a lot to under 10% while file transferring. Idle usage is close to 0. I do think there is something wrong with the latest version (2.3.6).

BTW, I am running btsync on my laptop. Hardware should not be an issue.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[RomanZ]

@spivoler We've found one more issue that could be related to increased CPU usage. I suggest to wait a bit for a new build (should be soon) with a possible fix.

[spivoler]

On 4/25/2016 at 6:17 AM, RomanZ said:

@spivoler We've found one more issue that could be related to increased CPU usage. I suggest to wait a bit for a new build (should be soon) with a possible fix.

Thanks, @RomanZ! Please let me know once the bug is fixed.

[spivoler]

Hi @RomanZ,

I just noticed that there is a newer version of BTsync available (2.3.7). Just tried and here is my test report

Good thing is the Idle state CPU usage has been decreased down to ~1%. I think you guys did an excellent job in fixing this. Thanks!

There is still another problem coming. It seems to be consuming more memory usage than ever. At the idle state, it takes ~180MB of my total memory... I know memory usage is always a problem. Just curious that if anyone is working on that.

Best

[Helen]

team is always working on it

See if you have any files stuck in sync queue - this is what may be forcing Sync to constantly work and  thus cause the problem. Try restarting Sync and see how memory will be increasing after that. And also increase folder rescan interval. If you have RO folders, enable "Overwrite" option. 

[spivoler]

11 hours ago, Helen said:

team is always working on it

See if you have any files stuck in sync queue - this is what may be forcing Sync to constantly work and  thus cause the problem. Try restarting Sync and see how memory will be increasing after that. And also increase folder rescan interval. If you have RO folders, enable "Overwrite" option. 

Thanks, @Helen for those suggestions. I have tried and nobody was stuck in the queue. But now it seems coming a brand new issue.... Whenever I start my laptop (client), btsync does indexing all over from the beginning and download all the files from the server side though they exist already on my laptop.... Is it a new bug?

[Helen]

there is no such bug known to us. IF files are resynced, then something changed in them - hash. size, mtime, etc. 

Can you please send the logs from your machines to support so that we could have something specific to look at rather than make assumptions? thank you. Please don't forget to put link to this forum topic, so that we knew where the logs come from.