High amount of seemingly useless disk write traffic?

[TheSeven]

I'm currently trying out Resilio Sync Pro and I'm considering to buy it, as it perfectly fits my needs except for one thing:

There seems to be an excessive amount of seemingly useless disk write traffic to be going on in the background (on Windows 10), which amounts to tens of gigabytes a day and might shorten SSD lifespan significantly. I'm talking about roughly 10 million write operations per hour according to Sysinternals Process Monitor.

I'm well aware that there are some things that just need to be written to disk, and that modern SSDs can take quite a lot of writes. I don't want to start a flame war on what SSDs can or cannot take here. What annoys me is just the nature of most of the data being written, which seems completely useless to me:

Quite a lot of it is going to a HUGE sync.log file. That log seems extremely verbose and easily accounts for hundreds of megabytes per day. I can understand why that might help in diagnosing issues, but I think there should be a way to turn that down to a sane level (or completely off) somewhere in the power user settings if everything is just working fine.

EDIT: Apparently this behavior can be configured using %APPDATA%\Resilio Sync\debug.txt which seems to be a bit mask of enabled debug sources / log levels.

What seems even more useless is an incredible amount of writes to very small %TEMP%\etilqs_* files, which are quite likely SQLite temporary tables. Given their volatile nature and the fact that they're tiny (<10KB usually) it might adequate to just keep them in RAM. AFAIK SQLite has a configuriation option for that, but there's nothing that the end user can do about it.

EDIT: More info: https://www.sqlite.org/tempfiles.html#the_sqlite_temp_store_compile_time_parameter_and_pragma

 

Are there any plans to mitigate those issues? These really seem easy enough to fix to me, although I guess that quite a large part of the user base doesn't really bother about this as much.

Apart from those nitpicks this really seems like the ideal product to fit my needs, which no other product on the market can right now. Realtime peer-to-peer sync with Selective Sync and the ability to handle large amounts of files without any apparent performance issues are the killer feature here.

Edited November 19, 2016 by TheSeven
Added some more info

[Helen]

Sync uses SQLITe libs to update database, and writes event to db. They are flushed to the disk to prevent corruption. The team will take a look into it. 

[TheSeven]

There has been further discussion with some more detail in support ticket #52811 if you want to take a look at that.

I do understand why some things need to be flushed to disk, but if my understanding of this matter is correct, the etilqs_* files aren't part of those (and never looked at during startup/recovery). The WAL etc. are flushed to disk quite often, which obviously makes sense. I haven't checked whether the etilqs_* files are actually flushed to disk as well, or if some of that could be caught by the OS cache (which would make sense for those).

Thanks for taking a look into this matter! It might not only make a difference for disk write activity, but possibly also for performance (CPU load).
I'd really love to see this awesome product become even better!