[Brian]

If synchronization is taking more than a couple (as in one or two) minutes, and there aren't any large embedded attachments, then something out of the ordinary is happening. Contact our support ninjas and we can help.

In order to preserve the ability to weave transactions that may be happening concurrently on separate devices into your database, OmniFocus writes small transaction files to the sync database rather than just uploading the new final state of the database.

We don't do this indefinitely; there is a process by which we figure out which transactions are "safe" to compact down into a single file. (Once we know that they've been synced over to all the devices you're syncing with.)

The 'smoosh' script forces this compaction - instead of the transaction files (add <foo>, edit <foo>'s start date, edit <foo>'s note) you just end up with one file that contains the end state of all those transactions.

This saves disk space and can make syncing quicker. Once we do that, though, if we see differences between the databases on your devices, we can't integrate them - you just choose which one is your 'real' data, and the other one is replaced.

We do compress the transaction files - they're all zip-encoded - but you don't want us to compact your database after every sync. You would be forced to pull it down to any given device before you could add anything to it. Instead of pushing a number of small files around as needed, you'd have to download the DB before you could edit it, and you'd have to push it back up when you were done. You also couldn't bounce back and forth between devices as easily.

In some cases - you've made a really large number of changes, you haven't synced all your devices in a long time, there are attachments, there's a bug - processing all the transaction files can take a while. Having the process take half an hour indicates something very out of the ordinary is going on, though.

Running the script can fix that, but the best thing to do is to contact the support ninjas so we can figure out why the sync is taking so long. It may or may not be a bug, but if it is, we can't fix it if we don't know about it.