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Initial sync via dropbox connection - super slow

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DannyM

10 Jun, 2024 11:20 PM

Hi,

I have 2 PCs (mine /partners) syncing Moneydance 2023.3 via dropbox connection, working fine.
My partner is upgrading laptop, and so I want to install a 3rd copy of moneydance on new PC while she continues to work on the old one.
She will not use / open Moneydance on old laptop until it's all running on the new one.

On the new PC, I have installed MOneydance, and following instructions to open via DropBox connection so that it can start with an initial sync.

It has been running more than 24 hours, had currently loaded more than 16,000 "MDTXN" files in the "in" folder of the tiksync directory.
These 16 thousand files (Increasing by about 2 or 3 per second), currently total about 100MB, This seems very slow for this amount of data.

I ran Toolbox on my copy of Moneydance, and it the dataset has following stats:

Dataset is NOT a Master Node >> It is a SECONDARY sync node
Dataset size: 214.8MBs (1784 files)
Dataset internal UUID: 899eaed5-5f05-45ef-9a6b-e6e3fe26f0f1
DATABASE OBJECT COUNT        (count) (est.size KBs): 
Object: mem_rpt                    5            3.3 
Object: csnap                  10035         2724.8 
Object: reminder                  57           42.2 
Object: secsubtypes                1            0.3 
Object: txn                    13847         6815.9 
Object: olsvc                      4            1.1 
Object: oltxns                    94            8.6 
Object: curr                      58           13.8 
Object: acct                     197           60.1 
Object: misc                       3            6.2 
 TOTAL:                        24301         9676.3

There is no indication during this initial sync how long there is to go. Am I waiting for 24,301 files to be downloaded from dropbox? 214 MB (the dataset size)?
Why does it take so long? Is there an API limiter/throttler on Dropbox connections?

Thanks

1. 1 Posted by dtd on 11 Jun, 2024 03:23 AM

   

   It should take 10-30 minutes so something is wrong.

   Based on your wording, are you opening on the third computer - File/New/Open Synced File? Also, Dropbox Folder would be better than Dropbox Connection (some/many feel)

   Your entire database is only 10mb, so if you have 100mb of something in dropbox, it is really wrong for some reason. Others are better experts here than I, but this is obviously wrong.

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2. 2 Posted by DannyM on 07 Jul, 2024 05:23 AM

   

   in the end, I decided not to create using an Initial Sync. Instead, I did the "move to another computer" technique (disable sync, copying the relevant moneydance folder files to new laptop, run MD on new laptop, confirm all data correct, re-enable sync ). That took all of 15 minutes...

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3. 3 Posted by dwg on 07 Jul, 2024 05:56 AM

   

   The long time to copy when there are systems that have been syncing long term is not that unusual.

   One of the common issues is that the shared storage i.e. Dropbox in this case, is not "managed". On the local machine Moneydance is routinely managing the data files by incorporating the incremental transaction files into the trunk file, pruning older files etc.

   This does not happen on the shared files, no single machine owns these files so there is no "owner" to take care of this, hence the number of files grows quite dramatically over time, this tends to clog up the copying of files when a new machine is introduced into the relationship, it is effectively copying every file created since syncing was started, and then applying them, rather than just copying the up-to-date state. So the benefit of having small incremental files when doing normal updates on existing systems is less than ideal when adding another machine.

   One thing that can be done is to rebuild the shared files from the files on the local machine. The Toolbox extension can be used to do this.

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4. System closed this discussion on 06 Oct, 2024 06:00 AM.