Ubuntu One sync is ridiculously slow

[Alex Wauck]

Binary package hint: ubuntuone-client

I purchased 99 MB of music from the Ubuntu One Music Store. These files are taking a *really* long time to download via ubuntuone-syncdaemon. The daemon has lost its connection several times during the sync process. I was able to download the files fairly quickly using the web interface, though, so I know I have a good connection to the Ubuntu One servers. I have attached syncdaemon.log showing the connection losses.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: ubuntuone-client 1.2.1-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-21.32-generic 2.6.32.11+drm33.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-21-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Apr 28 14:11:38 2010
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" - Beta amd64 (20100318)
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/usr/bin/zsh
SourcePackage: ubuntuone-client
UbuntuOneOAuthLoginLog: 2010-04-28 13:22:13,100:100.596904755 UbuntuOne.OAuthDesktop.auth Token was not successfully retrieved: data was 'Invalid request token: F6WXgXmhXjPRdszDs7Md'
UbuntuOneSyncdaemonExceptionsLog: 2010-04-28 13:57:37,276 - ubuntuone.SyncDaemon.ActionQueue - ERROR - Download share:'bb897a17-c68b-4b20-8dca-ea3c99e612d6' node:'307c545b-94cf-40f0-8a15-de1a071747d2' Download(fileobj_factory='<function <lambda> at 0x23fd8c0>', share_id="'bb897a17-c68b-4b20-8dca-ea3c99e612d6'", node_id="'307c545b-94cf-40f0-8a15-de1a071747d2'", server_hash="'sha1:0156f3ee7aede9b64f6da0a060fc6871be8798dc'") failure INTERNAL_ERROR

[Alex Wauck (awauck)]

I have attached syncdaemon-exceptions.log

[Alex Wauck (awauck)]

Everything related to Ubuntu One syncing seems to be taking ridiculously long. It took a substantial amount of time (probably longer than it took for me to download the files via the web interface) just for ubuntuone-syncdaemon to get the names of the files from the server! I only have 16 files on Ubuntu One, so it should definitely not take so long to do this.

[Alex Wauck (awauck)]

It seems to have picked up a bit at the end. I am attaching the new syncdaemon.log.

[Alex Wauck (awauck)]

I started a sync on a different machine at 17:51:00, and as of 18:27:00, it only knows about 10 files it needs to sync (total number of files: 16). It has not downloaded any actual data yet.

[Martin Albisetti (beuno)]

Hi Alex,

We've deployed a whole new infrastructure and server farm to cope with the existing and upcoming load. We're in the process of fine-tuning things to take advantage of the new capacity.
Everything should be working at acceptable speed within the next 24 hours. Apologies for the inconveniences.

Marking the bug as invalid, not because it's not something that needs to be fixed, but because it's a transient problem that is being addressed.

[Alex Wauck (awauck)]

That's good to hear. Why was it so slow with ubuntuone-syncdaemon but not with the web interface, though?

[Martin Albisetti (beuno)]

So, the web ui has direct access to the database, where as the desktop client goes through API servers. We've deployed more database servers, which is why the web ui is faster, and we're not fine-tuning the number of concurrent threads and optimal number of API servers to get the best performance.
Once we figure out the best set up, scaling is simply adding more hardware. The increase in users caught us off-guard, there has been a significant increase a month ahead of expected. Both a curse and a blessing, as you can see :)

[Alexander Hungenberg (alexander-hungenberg-gmail)]

mmh... unfortunately ubuntu-one is still very slow here ;-) It's syncing my bash rc file since 30min now...

[jimmij (jameha)]

+1

[Duane Hinnen (duanedesign)]

Alexander,
Did you eventually get all your songs downloaded to your cloud storage and to your computer locally? I just got a song and it downloaded very quickly. The new roll outs seem to be improving the speed issues. Not perfect yet, but definitely getting better.

After making a new comment please change the 'Status' of your bug back to 'New'. The status of a bug report can be modified by clicking on the current status in the yellow line, which will reveal a sub menu. You can then set a new status in the drop down box.

thank you,
duanedesign

[Alex Wauck (awauck)]

Yes, I got everything transferred. It just took a ridiculously long time. I have not needed to sync anything since then, so I don't know if the problem has gone away. I am currently assuming that the problem was due to load on the API servers. I will file a new bug if I find Ubuntu One to be consistently slow in the future.

[Alex Wauck (awauck)]

I recently downloaded a new album, and it transferred much faster.

[gomez (gomez-jinrin)]

Hi,
My Observation was, that it needs not so much time for bigger files, but it needs very long to at first sync the whole Folder Tree, if it is some bigger structure... i wanted to sync a html Manual, but i took about two days, just to sync the folders, and another Day to sync the the small Files. i don't have much problems putting selected files, like odt documents with about 2 MB
the handling of many files is really slow...

When connecting another PC to that account it takes for ages to have synced every bit.
I don't have much insight of the syncing mechanics, but i believe there are some things which add up.

1. scan folders and files (if not fully scanned i think it restarts at the beginning)
2. first folder sync (the top level Folders are synced, than the second level and so one) if that is not finished before logging out from linux it restarts the very long scan process again.
3 . filesync is very slow: small files (about a view KB) are not much faster than 1-2 MB files, not to mention bigger files... The filetransfer itself is pretty fast, but the handing what file comes where and so one is very slow

Thats very frustrating

perhaps there are some possibilities to handle the syncing of many files and folders more efficient

thats mostly my observation, not a scientific speedtest, I know. i believe, that's not really needed. it should be "recognisably" faster...

Thanks

[Duane Hinnen (duanedesign)]

gomez,
thank you for taking the time to share your experience. I know the team is working hard to make the sync process as efficient as possible. They have identified areas for improvement and are working through that plan.

thank you,
duanedesign

[Alex Wauck (awauck)]

I have started a fresh sync process on a new machine, and it has taken a very long time just to get directory names synchronized (it has not even synchronized any file data yet, and it looks like metadata also has yet to be synchronized for most files). The following u1sdtool report has not changed in the entire time I have watched it.

$ u1sdtool -s
State: QUEUE_MANAGER
        connection: With User With Network
        description: processing queues
        is_connected: True
        is_error: False
        is_online: True
        queues: WORKING_ON_BOTH

[Bèr Kessels (berkes) (ber)]

A good way to illustrate this, is to share a large package of files in tarred and untarred format.
The tarred version takes about 10 minutes to be picked up, processed and uploaded.
The untarred, several hundred of tiny textfiles, has been syncing for over 2 days and counting.

Tailing various logs (~/.cache/ubuntuone/logs/*.log) showed me that the processing of metadata seems to be the bottleneck. Uploads themselves are fast, as others mentioned too. And as my tarred vs untarred example learned me too.

So, while this may be related to the servers, I am confident that changes to the client would help a lot too.
What can we, as developers do to help?

On a related note:
I found that after tweaking my firewall a bit, things went from "stalled" to "very very slow": a tiny speed improvement. I opened up 443 entirely, as it was forwarded to one machine. Though, in theory, this should not matter: ubuntu one client connects localhost->u1server:443 but not u1server->local:443. That latter is what I had blocked.
Removing that: and on all 3 machines that are syncing, I could suddenly pass the "doing auth dance", and get u1 to actually sign in and start syncing.

[Alex Wauck (awauck)]

Was there an upgrade recently? I found the metadata sync to be quite speedy today, but I am quite far away from where I was before (Midwest USA as opposed to East Coast USA), so that could be part of it, too.

[Wouter Schut (ubuntu-seweso)]

I did not install or signed up for ubuntu-one. Why is this even running on my system? And why is it hogging so much resources?

I guess this is the year of windows for me, after a year of ubuntu use I am quiting. Stupid shit. Everything breaks after my upgrade.

[Duane Hinnen (duanedesign)]

The issue that caused the problem for the OP has been fixed. So I am closing this bug. Please continue to report any bugs you may find.

In regards to the comments about the slow processing of metadata see bug 531273

[Tomislav Parčina (tomo-sok)]

I have put 163.7 MB in 1,502 files on Ubuntu one few hours ago and so far it has synced only 75 MB.

I believe that this BUG should be reopened.

Best regards.

--
Tomislav

[Tomislav Parčina (tomo-sok)]

Today I have added another 75 MB to Ubuntu One and in one hour time it didn't synchronize anything (or weary little).

If you need any more informations please let me know.

Best regards.

[mastapat11 (trackp200)]

I'm on Lucid for almost a yr and it has ALWAYS worked this crappy (upgrades and all). For the longest time, i've had a whopping 500kb in the cloud and sync was dog shit slow from pc to pc to virts. i made the horrible mistake of add two 5mb files last night and its going on 24hrs still trying to just sync them to the cloud, not even other pcs.

this can not simply be a lack of servers still. something is wrong w/ this client/api. and i've NEVER seen it fixed on multiple pcs & ver of ubu (lucid, mav, natty). Even if it was my physical location being too far from the nearest u1 server, this is absurd! 24 HOURS & counting!!!

i have the log attached:

[John O'Brien (jdobrien)]

On 03/19/2011 12:01 AM, mastapat11 wrote:
> I'm on Lucid for almost a yr and it has ALWAYS worked this crappy
> (upgrades and all). For the longest time, i've had a whopping 500kb in
> the cloud and sync was dog shit slow from pc to pc to virts. i made the
> horrible mistake of add two 5mb files last night and its going on 24hrs
> still trying to just sync them to the cloud, not even other pcs.
>
> this can not simply be a lack of servers still. something is wrong w/
> this client/api. and i've NEVER seen it fixed on multiple pcs & ver of
> ubu (lucid, mav, natty). Even if it was my physical location being too
> far from the nearest u1 server, this is absurd! 24 HOURS & counting!!!
>
> i have the log attached:
>

We had systemic problems the other night that took a while to diagnose. We apologise for the inconvenience.

Regarding speed of different versions, the lucid version unfortunately did have performance issues with its sync
process. However, latest versions have significant performance improvements due to a rewrite of the sync process. The
latest nightly builds of the client include more performance improvements.

[ALFRED ANTONELLI JR (alfred-antonelli)]

Downloading music from UbuntuOne is so slow it is not usable. I started a download last night at 10:00pm and at 10:00AM this morning it is still downloading.

[chrisfaron (chrisfaron)]

+1 same issue with natty, tried reducing the number of folders and it still made no difference

[Osmo Laitinen (osmo-laitinen)]

+1 here as well. Just tested with file
-rw-r--r-- 1 ossi ossi 55 2010-11-06 12:32 ajat.txt

And it took several minutes to upload it, for that size, it should be seconds.
Please, find attached syncdaemon.log

[Osmo Laitinen (osmo-laitinen)]

And yes, Android client seems to work quite fast.

[Christian Kirbach (christian-kirbach-e)]

Something must be still wrong with ubuntu one. I have purchased €35 worth of music, and it has been downloading for many hours,
still way to go.
As supportive as I am in favour of Ubuntu, If this is common customer experience, then I am afraid to say
Ubuntu one music is not competitive at all.

[Redsandro (redsandro)]

+1 in 2013.
I have synced 3MB in 3 hours. I put the same folder (1GB of files) in Dropbox, and it was done in half an hour (!).

[Rayna Thompson (raynathompson)]

I upgraded the Ubuntu One storage to 45GB because I wanted to use the built-in backup on this computer. I hadn't migrated anything yet to this new laptop, so there is only about 2 GB to backup.

It has now been SIX hours and it isn't finished!

If this is the speed of backups, I will NOT be renewing my subscription. Too bad I paid for the whole year. I guess I should have only gotten a month's worth. I'm feeling a bit duped right now.

[Franck78 (fbourdonnec)]

Hello,

LTS 12.04
U1client 3.0.2
Free 5Gb storage

Same story in 2014 !
Wanted to sync 600 photos files (1.5Gb). Almost nothing done after 12 hours (200 files)
Most of the time, nothing is going out. Just some burst of data for 10-20 seconds.

Ended up doing manual upload.

Syncing computer alone, was not used for anything else.

Franck