I’ve been a long time Odrive customer, but lately I’ve needed to change my tune to different sync system due to my growing needs / Odrive flakiness on mac OS High Sierra/Mojave.
**I do not have Odrive running by default, but I end up with 2-6+ or more Odrive Finder Extensions running at .3 CPU 24/7. It usually starts at 2 extensions on a fresh reboot, then over a day or two of use, they keep multiplying themselves to my Activity monitor. **
My primary question here is how do I remove all traces of odrive/extensions? (At least for the sake of allowing a totally fresh install later, I really do want Odrive to work in my system).
Additionally/secondarily: When I am selectively syncing very large projects (1 - 10 tb+, billions of records, etc) finder in Mojave with Odrive running becomes unusably glitchy and slow. I have seen other threads about this, but it seems there may another issue here that must be resolved first.
Hi @Jess1,
The number of odrive extension processes relates to how Finder’s extension framework works. Finder, itself, will load a few instances as default behavior for the Finder app. Additional extension instances are created when Finder is used within other applications, as well.
For example, if you open a file browser within the TextEdit app (File->open), a new odrive Finder Extension process will be run for that Finder instance that was created. If you close TextEdit, then that process should be terminated within a minute or two. Finder tends to keep these processes around longer it seems it should, sometimes. odrive doesn’t perform the actual loading and unloading, so it doesn’t have a say in how Finder is doing this through the framework. This same behavior can be seen with lots of other applications that happen to load a Finder instance, so you can end up seeing a a number of odrive Finder extension processes pop-up.
Without an uninstall, if you exit odrive and uncheck the odrive extension in System Preferences -> Extensions, you should also see the odrive Finder extension processes go away after a little bit.
For the sluggishness you are seeing, this is probably just a side-effect of having so much data exposed. odrive has to work very hard to keep all of that data in sync, so there will be quite a bit of overhead. The amount of overhead is directly related to the amount of data that odrive has to keep track of. Are you actually exposing billions of files locally, or you working with a subset of that?
Thanks for this excellent info. I just ran the commands in your instructions, all went well. I will verify everything is clean when I get a chance to do a reboot.
I am always working with a subset of data or library, but I think you uncovered an underlying flaw in my thinking/use of Odrive.
I usually use odrive from a largish / portable raid ssd. This way I can process / initialize raw data and media locally and quickly before getting on with subsets and snippets and dumping everything else into a cloud location.
Correct me if I am wrong here, but perhaps syncing bigger data (say, 500gb - 1tb) from my local (external raid) storage to a cloud provider- and vice-versa- every so often ends up exposing Odrive to way more stuff than my mid-tier mac bargained for?
Hi @Jess1,
You have the right idea. The actual amount of data in size isn’t an issue, but the number of objects is. Each object (file or folder) has to be continually tracked/monitored by odrive while it is within odrive’s “view”.
There are some recent changes to the client that try to mitigate the effect a bit:
We’ve reduced the aggressiveness of our scanning and put some limits around the frequency of high-overhead operations.
We added the ability to disable background scanning (you can see the option under the top entry of the odrive menu), which will reduce activity by quite a bit (especially with very large data sets) at the expense of odrive seeing remote changes automatically. In this mode odrive will still upload new/changed files, but it won’t actively look for changes on the remote storage. Navigating into folders will still trigger a refresh of the remote content and manual right-click->refreshes will, as well. This option may be useful to you when performing bulk imports or for times when you have not yet pared-down your “active” set of data with unsync.
Your post prompted me to take a look at the Finder extension a bit. We currently have logic in odrive that will re-enable the extension after a period of time if the user disables it. I think we can modify this so that it will not enable the extension if the user has disabled it after an odrive app start. This could also be used as another lever to reduce general overhead in Finder when you have a lot of data, or a lot of activity.
