why refresh so slow(or why refresh?)

[shen]

seems you need to download the gif to see it animate...
why this forum limit zip upload to 97k...

[Zoë]

Shen,

Does the window stay responsive while it's in the "Refreshing" state? Can you change the selected line and open/close folders? Is the folder you selected on an FTP site?

Edit: If you select a bunch of files on the remote side (say, 10), and use the "Refresh Selection" action, how long does the stop button in the toolbar flash for?

[shen]

Yes, it's responsive. you can see in the movie I double clicked to expand the folder to be copied.
I just did a test with 25 files selected, total size 992KB, "Refresh Selection" action took 28 seconds(stop button flash for 28 seconds). Thenk I right click again and select copy to left, it will show refresh about another 28 seconds. and after refresh finished, it used 66 seconds to copy those files.

[shen]

this issue still exist in the released BC3. are you guys going to ignore it? or you have diffculity to reproduce it?

[Michael Bulgrien]

Shen,

You never replied to my initial response to your original post. In your folder compare session, if you open the Comparison tab in Session Settings, are you only using Quick Tests? Or are you using a comparison method that requires opening files?

In the Handling tab, do you have the "Automatically scan subfolders in background" option selected?

Whatever the case, Beyond Compare uses cached (static) information about the folders being compared so that the file filters and toggles can be updated/changed quickly without re-reading the files on disk. Beyond Compare refreshes the cached information to make sure it is up to date before doing major operations like copies and moves. I am curious... if you do the same activity in BC2 that you captured in the BC3 .GIF video (with similar comparison settings) is BC3 significantly slower? Or is it just a perception due to how the refresh activity is relected to the user in BC3?

[shen]

thanks Michael, I run a full copy test use BC2 and BC3 again.
all using default settings that installed with the program, nothing changed. i.e, it's using quick tests, and have the "Automatically scan subfolders in background" option selected.
it took 6'17" for BC2 to copy all 36 files
for BC3, it took 40" for refresh, and finished copy in 3'24", total time is 4'04", yes, it's faster than BC2 with the BC3 Release version. but it would be nice if the 40 seconds refresh can be reduced...
if you need I can send you the video. it's too big I can't reduce to a gif this time. you can pm me your email.

[Michael Bulgrien]

Thanks for comparing the BC3 copy with BC2.

I agree that the long refresh times are disconcerting... but knowing how BC3 caches folder and file information (which allows other activitiy to be considerably quicker and more efficient) I doubt that reducing the "refresh time" would be a trivial task. My guess is that users would not even notice the refresh as much if there wasn't a refresh progress bar. Providing the extra feedback actually draws more attention to the "refresh" activity than would otherwise occur. Since the overall copy is actually faster in BC3, my opinion would be that this is really more of a user experience issue than a performance issue.

Since I'm not part of the Scooter team, there is nothing I can do about it... but I am glad you were able to confirm that BC3 copies are quicker than BC2.

[Zoë]

I'm not sure we can decrease the time in the general case. BC2 and BC3 are both doing the same thing, which is refreshing a file's information immediately before showing any prompts (overwrite newer, readonly, etc). The only difference is that BC3 does it up-front, during the "Refreshing..." stage, and BC2 does it before each individual copy.

There are a few things we can look into, but any change would probably have to be a tweak rather than standard behavior. Adding with the fact that BC3 is actually faster than BC2 in the end does make this a lower priority issue.

[b266]

Hi, can you explain what you mean by "The only difference is that BC3 does it up-front, during the "Refreshing..." stage, and BC2 does it before each individual copy." ??

That loooong wait for "Refreshing" at the start is really annoying. I just ran a folder compare a couple of seconds ago, and then I say to copy or mirror a folder to the right, and it has to wait for a minutes to be "Refreshing" first. Why? I just loaded the comparison, there should be no need to refresh anything.

p.s. I'm not comparing contents, and when I say I just ran a folder compare, I mean I used left click in explorer and then right click compare to etc. It then takes the time necessary to compare them, and then when I start to do something immediately afterwards, it has to refresh? I don't get it.

[Aaron]

The refreshing stage in BC3 is checking to see if it will run into any conflicts that need user interaction: confirmation boxes where the user will need to pick Yes or No to actually copying that file. In BC2, we did these checks right before each file, so you could be 5 minutes or 2 hours into a copy and then it would popup and wait for interaction.

In BC3, we do those checks ahead of time, then copy without checking each file.

Refreshing may seem slow, but is it actually slower for the entire operation (beginning of copying to end of copy) than BC2?

[DorothyFan1]

I really don't understand this issue. I've been reading all this in a curious state of puzzlement because I haven't experienced this problem. To be fair...I only do my comparisons separately and then I run the copy process separately. Granted...I don't have many files to allow BC3 to take this job alone so I really wouldn't have the need to let BC3 automate this step. Otherwise...it would be an issue if I needed to quickly compare folders and do synchronizing if I had many files.

I think what may be causing the problem is the way Windows handles the requests for doing this operation...if that's what is really being discussed here. What hasn't been answered to my satisfaction is whether BC3 is self sufficient in doing this comparison and refresh job alone or whether it sends these calls directly to the Windows kernel for job processing. If BC3 sends the comparison and synchronizing orders to its own internal mechanism...then this is clearly a problem that needs resolving within BC3. OTOH, if these calls are given to Windows to process...then this could be entirely out of BC3's hand as XP/Vista have to translate the calls and redirects the actions back to BC3 that is not being correctly handled.

Maybe what BC3 needs is a complete macro language built in to allow filtering out stages where performance drag comes in. I read a commentary on the problems involved with file locking. If one doesn't have enough resources to perform an action...the software puts the brakes on the action to ensure enough memory can be allocated to finish a particular function.

[b266]

hi Aaron, thanks for your clear response.

a couple of thoughts...

1) if that is what it is doing then I would probably display the caption "Analyzing" or "Checking for issues" or something rather than "Refreshing".

2) since I often use BC for mirroring folders, I would like this refreshing/checking phase to be skipped, since I just want to mirror to the right. when mirroring I shouldn't need to give any confirmations - a mirror is a mirror - so is there any way I can avoid that annoying delay? I looked thru the options and found "Synchronize confirmations" which defaults to prompt. If I set this to "Yes to All" will it avoid the Refreshing phase when doing a synchronize from the folder compare screen?

[gbenson]

Major problem with refreshing

Yesterday I had done testing on this "Refreshing" issue on our local network and found BC3 to be faster than BC2. However then I started up my scripts to remote sites I ran into a major problem with it. It has been 'refreshing' for 16 hours. (BC2 would have had everything copied by now).

Some background. There are about 1 million files in 8 folders. About 50,000 files have changed (total size of those files is about 600MB). I am replicating to remote sites with a connection speed of about 300Kps or less.

We need a way to disable this. If my comparison rules indicate the remote file is different, BC3 needs to just copy the file and ignore and other rules. At this point I have no choice but to go back to BC2.

[Zoë]

gbenson: Are you loading multiple sessions/base folders and synching them one after the other, or loading a base folder and synching everything in one go?

[Zoë]

Also, are you doing an interactive comparison or using scripts? I could probably be convinced to drop the refreshing stage from scripts since they're less likely to sit idle.