Comment 17 for bug 571371

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.