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Thank you for the post Brian. I should have been clearer about the problem. It sounds like this may not be a real problem? Although I've attributed this to syncing not completing and crashes on my iPhone. That attribution may be false. :-) My thought was the data is not being written to mobileMe because of those cannot connect to root errors. My understanding now is this is incorrect.

I've been performing the Rebuild Database. Does this do the same thing as backing up and restoring?

Thank you for the help with this.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian View Post
Ken just pointed out that disconnected transactions can be created in situations other than the bugs from the beta. Example: a laptop goes to sleep while we're in the process of cleaning up after a newly-coalesced database.

He also pointed out that another way to remove them from the database would be to run the 'smooshing' script posted here.
I'll try the smooshing script. My syncs are taking in the realm of 30 min. Not sure what happened here. They were working great. I've tried deleting my mobile me file and re-syncing a fresh new file up to MM. Then using that copy to sync to my other computers and phone. Hopefully this script will help.

Thank you for the help.
 
Holy Sync! I think that worked! The smooshing script smooshed.

When I hit sync on my OF desktop or iPhone it completes within 15 seconds! I'll see how it holds up once I start changing the data in my OF document.

Before, when I would try to sync, it would take 5 to 30 min. Even if I had just synced. This would also cause OF on the desktop to be constantly syncing, because it was finding errors or what not.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian View Post
Ken just pointed out that disconnected transactions can be created in situations other than the bugs from the beta. Example: a laptop goes to sleep while we're in the process of cleaning up after a newly-coalesced database.
I just testing syncing using the edge network on the iPhone. Dramatic improvement! Before, it was taking 15 minutes to sync. Now it took under 30 seconds!

With devices going to sleep... would the same problem be caused by the iPhone going into auto lock while the sync is occurring? My syncs were taking so long that if I wasn't diligent enough to touch the iPhone during a sync to keep it from going into auto lock, the phone would auto lock during a sync.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by SpiralOcean View Post
I'll try the smooshing script. My syncs are taking in the realm of 30 min. Not sure what happened here. They were working great. I've tried deleting my mobile me file and re-syncing a fresh new file up to MM. Then using that copy to sync to my other computers and phone.
Blowing away the database on MobileMe and resyncing just copies a fresh copy of what you have on the client doing the sync. If that client doesn't have a compacted database, or has a bunch of disconnected transactions, the new copy on MobileMe will be the same way. It will fix cases where the MobileMe copy was corrupted (someone/something went and deleted or changed some files in the package) but it won't cause the compaction to happen.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by SpiralOcean View Post
I'll see how it holds up once I start changing the data in my OF document.

Before, when I would try to sync, it would take 5 to 30 min. Even if I had just synced. This would also cause OF on the desktop to be constantly syncing, because it was finding errors or what not.
If in the future you can make sure that your clients all get synced together every day or so, your database shouldn't grow to the extent that this becomes a problem, unless you start accumulating lots of big attachments.
 
Roger that. I haven't been using embedded attachments in OF and will sync as much as possible.

It's much easier to keep files in sync when it's not taking so long. :rolleyes:
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by whpalmer4 View Post
Blowing away the database on MobileMe and resyncing just copies a fresh copy of what you have on the client doing the sync. If that client doesn't have a compacted database, or has a bunch of disconnected transactions, the new copy on MobileMe will be the same way. It will fix cases where the MobileMe copy was corrupted (someone/something went and deleted or changed some files in the package) but it won't cause the compaction to happen.
This is just about becoming more trouble than it is worth.

I have a brand new database with about 20 tasks and 4 projects in it created on 1.5. I have OF on my iphone3G but forget about that for now. I simply go
to sync my newly created, apparently overly fat for some reason, database with Webdav OR MM and it takes longer than 30 mins.

Question 1:
Now this "smoosher" is a script that will, or will not compress the database?

Question 2:
Why when we are dealing with low speed devices like WIFI and broadband
would this compression not already be built in as a standard exit "clean-up"
process? Instead we are putering with syncing to MM, it is newest, delete
local copy, sync with MM, sync with Iphone, you are good for a few days?

When writing an application that maintains a database, yes I do keep in mind
the size of the database for optimization when customers are using high speed, and expecially when using low speed devices.

Well, at least I have no need to pay for MM, Bingodisk, or any others.
Local sync is not an option, WIFI not allowed. So it is either MM or WebDav.
I would say that OF is really just a laptop solution. Too many issues from
speed of an inbox (yes with autosync off) it is still slower than a index card INBOX. I have a database size issue with 4 projects and 20 tasks.

You know a new database with one Inbox entry took 22 mins to sync. :(
 
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.

Last edited by Brian; 2008-11-19 at 12:48 PM..
 
Update on syncing after running the smooshing script and using OF on three different devices for a day.

Night and Day. Syncing is incredibly fast. This has dramatically changed my user experience. I almost don't have to think about syncing anymore. Incredible.
 
 


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