I have been consistently having issues with Odrive performance since I signed up several months ago:
Since I have a lot of data to sync, odrive is still working to upload everything for the first time. However, it completely hogs my internet connection (evidenced by the Network pane in Activity Monitor) and I have to quit and restart it several times a day to restore my internet connection. (I have upload throttling set to “normal.”)
The menu bar item almost never loads. When I click on it, it highlights for a few moments and then unhighlights without opening the menu. I have to quit and restart to be able to access the menu.
Same for the Finder window menu button. When I click on it, it says “Waiting” and nothing ever happens. Only fix is to relaunch.
The worst part is that because the menus don’t load, the only way to quit the app is to select it in Activity Monitor and choose “Quit”.
So far I’m really happy with Odrive’s features and I’m a paying subscriber, but these bugs are getting really annoying.
I’m running Mac OS 10.14.4 BTW. The only other cloud service that is running on the machine is iCloud Drive.
Any help is appreciated. Thanks.
Hi @alisoncastle,
The behavior you are describing sounds like odrive is very busy. Do you know how much data you are trying to upload (number of files, folders, and the total size of the data)?
Right when you start up odrive, can you try disabling background scanning in the submenu at the top of the odrive menu? This should decrease some background activity. I am guessing that the odrive menu will load when the app first starts.
At the same time can you also send a diagnostic from the odrive menu so I can take a closer look at the configuration?
Hi Tony. I disabled background scanning and sent a diagnostic—at least, I think I did. After clicking Send Report I did not get any confirmation. Please let me know if you received it.
Yes, there is a lot of data, many video files on an external drive. I have been leaving my Mac running around the clock for months to try to complete the first backup to Google Drive, except that I often have to quit it during the day when I’m working and it hogs the internet connection.
Hi @alisoncastle,
Thanks for sending the diagnostic over. There is definitely a lot of activity. Here are a few recommendations for how to proceed with your bulk upload:
Reduce the upload concurrency to just 1 file at a time. This should help to reduce the load on the system by quite a bit. To do this, go to your default odrive folder (/Users/ali/odrive) and find the file named odrive_user_premium_conf.txt. Open that file and change the maxConcurrentUploads from 4 to 1. Save the file and then restart odrive. Don’t change the in-menu throttling settings after this, since it will override this setting.
When odrive starts, disable background scanning
Try syncing your external folders separately instead of all at the same time. What I mean by this is you can right-click->“remove sync” on all but one of the active folders, wait for that 1 remaining sync folder to finish, and then add the next, and so on. Right now you have 6-7 external folders being actively synced by odrive, which requires a ton of processing power. For bulk upload use cases, it is best to break-up these types of operations so that odrive can “focus” on one large folder at a time.
Just let me know if you have any questions about the above steps.
Thanks, Tony, I’ve done all of these steps. May I ask what disabling background scanning means for the other files that are being synced? Does this prevent new changes from being synced to Google Drive?
Hi @alisoncastle,
Disabling background scanning will stop odrive from periodically scanning the remote storage for changes.
This means that a change on the remote storage will not be seen by odrive until you actually browse into the changed location (vs it being picked up automatically in the background). This does not affect odrive behavior when you make local changes. Your local changes will still automatically upload to your remote storage.
OK, I see. That will mean that changes made on my other Mac won’t by synced to this one, but I guess I’ll have to make that sacrifice for the time being, until all of my data has made its initial backup—assuming that once this is done, I can turn on background scanning again.
Incidentally, ever since I changed the config file and relaunched, I’m no longer getting Finder badges showing Odrive status. I tried to quit and relaunch to no avail.
Hi @alisoncastle,
The changes from your other Mac will sync to this one if you browse into the folder. So, for example, if you are looking for something specific that was added on the other Mac, navigating to the folder where it should be will trigger a refresh and allow you to see that change.
For the badges, the changes should not affect those. Do you still see the right-click menu options when clicking on folders within odrive? Can you try toggling the “odriveapp” Finder extension in the Mac “System Preferences” -> “Extensions” and see if that has any effect?
Are you seeing activity in the odrive menu under “syncing changes”?
Yes I’m seeing activity in the odrive menu, it is showing 10 changes currently syncing. Is there a way to change the max amount of simultaneous downloads? Odrive is still becoming unresponsive shortly after launch.
As for the badges, I can’t figure out how to get them back. I need to be able to see which subfolders are already synced so I can stop the syncing on all but one folder at a time.
Hi @alisoncastle,
Can you send another diagnostic, when you get a chance, so I can take a look at things and see if there are any other optimizations we can make?
Hi @alisoncastle,
I took a look at the diagnostic and here are my recommendations:
I think we still need to reduce the scope of data that odrive is trying to deal with for all of these uploads.
There are 12 “sync to odrive” folders, many of which look like very large data repositories. Instead of trying to unsync what is already synced, let’s reduce what odrive is currently looking at and allow it to concentrate on one data repository at a time.
I will send you specifics in a direct message in a couple of minutes.