This app is unusable and unreliable

[stevenstallone]

I've been wanting something like this for a while and google's gemini spit the name of this app out when asked it for an app that does this. I played around with it and it's completely unusable. I transferred 2 text documents perfectly fine to my second PC. Then tested out bigger files like window installation files (4gb).

The transfer speeds are abysmally slow, it's unfathomably slow bouncing between 0/kbs - 300/kbs, I was expecting something more along the lines of 900/mbs, since there was a lan connection. Blip, the gold standard of peer2peer file transfer programs sends the same file at 900/mbs, i get it in under a minute.

I turned on a VPN during transfer to see what would happen and now the app is completely broke, both synced repositories don't even know the one exists now, even with the vpn off and restarting the app. on both PC's. At the moment it doesn't even transfer files, they act completely independently of each other.

I like how it makes it's own O: drive on windows, this is a feature is one i like a lot, but it's completely useless. The size of the disk as windows is concerned is 1GB and half the drive is full. So pasting a file bigger than 512mb using file explorer isn't possible because it's too big, you have to use Ouisync to add files, it's a bottleneck and completely makes the O: drive redundant.

I like everything about this app expect the fact that it doesn't work. I know this is a community app, it's open source but it's been knocking about since 2022 and it's completely unreliable and slow.

[inetic]

Thank you for taking time to create the issue. Even if negative, feedback is very important to us as we don't always see the same issues as users do or we don't assign priorities as high as users would.

The transfer speeds are abysmally slow, it's unfathomably slow bouncing between 0/kbs - 300/kbs

This one in particular might be a UI/UX issue, I think the way the core syncing library passes information to the GUI doesn't do the calculations correctly which results in the "bouncing" numbers. So the actual speed might be higher than the one shown by the GUI.

If you had the time, could you try to measure the actual time how long it takes transferring a large file from one device to another? If not, it is something we'll be looking at, though unfortunately our small team's responsibilities are at other tasks and so it'd need to wait.

That said, no syncing app will ever be as fast as Blip because - as far as I can tell - Blip simply streams data from one peer to another. Syncing on the other hand requires additional time and bandwidth to agree which parts of a repository need to be transferred. We do agree that Ouisync should aim to approach the Blip's speed as much as possible though.

I turned on a VPN during transfer to see what would happen and now the app is completely broke, both synced repositories don't even know the one exists now, even with the vpn off and restarting the app. on both PC's. At the moment it doesn't even transfer files, they act completely independently of each other.

Again, very useful for us to know. We haven't tested with VPNs yet. The good news is that VPNs are something we'll be looking into in recent future, so we'll be testing it and hopefully will fix it as well.

The size of the disk as windows is concerned is 1GB and half the drive is full.

This is strange and sounds like a bug. The disk should not be half full and should not be limited to 1GB. Instead it should grow with the repository size. The repository itself is stored as a <repo-name>.ouisyncdb file in C:\Users\<User>\.... One explanation could be that the drive C: has only 1GB of space left, but that wouldn't explain why copying the file works using the GUI.

We'll try to address all these issues, though unfortunately we're unable to dedicate too much time to it as quickly as we'd like due to a shift in priorities. We're still actively working on the core syncing library, so some of the fixes might come as a result of that, but for some others we need to ask users to give us more time.

[stevenstallone]

I made a screenshot to show everything. 1GB limit is on both PC's, the cache server is turned off. The actual transfer speed is a bit higher but not that much better. You can't paste a file over 512mb into the explorer O: drive so I used the app to put the file in, it's very sluggish, it more than 30 seconds to register. In test 1, the sync file is visible, I presume that means the sync is broken on that repository. It's a nice idea for an application but like you said, it's probably not going anywhere any time soon. Thanks