Hi All,
I’ve been using FreeFileSync for about two years or so and have two Business Edition installations on two different servers, and just love it.
I’ve noticed on both servers that, over time, the logs show that a time gap between the Scanning phase of a scheduled task batch job and the Sync phase gradually increases over time to be several hours long. The timeframe for it getting noticeably bad is maybe two months.
I initially thought that installing a different version of FreeFileSync solved the problem, and it may have Once, but the problem recurred and that 'fix' isn't working anymore.
Upon further investigation using ProcMon to see what processes are actually running on the server, I now think the problem is related to FreeFileSync querying, writing, reading the sync.ffs_lock file to the root of the destination location over and over again for hours. This happens even whey sync.ffs_lock is specifically set to be excluded in the filter.
I'll include a screenshot of a small portion of what I'm seeing.
Just wondering if anyone has any idea why this is happening or how to fix it (assuming that is, indeed, the problem!
Thanks
Long delay between Scan and Sync phases
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The LOCK files exist so only a single FFS instance can access as base location at a time. Excluding them manually doesn't do anything, as they are ignored anyway. The are created when starting and operation and deleted when finished. It is odd that there are this many though. My three best guesses:
1. Your scheduled tasks are never completing and the files aren't deleted. FFS can detect and recover from this automatically, but who knows.
2. You have multiple jobs running. One takes longer and longer to run and the other one is waiting for the LOCK to be removed before going to the sync phase.
3. Something else is deleting the LOCK file and FFS gets stuck in a loop recreating it until it starts fast enough.
I like my third guess the best, but the behavior is very odd. I just notice that it never gets deleted by FFS, but the create is successful every time. I would wager that that would result in an error if the file already existed.
1. Your scheduled tasks are never completing and the files aren't deleted. FFS can detect and recover from this automatically, but who knows.
2. You have multiple jobs running. One takes longer and longer to run and the other one is waiting for the LOCK to be removed before going to the sync phase.
3. Something else is deleting the LOCK file and FFS gets stuck in a loop recreating it until it starts fast enough.
I like my third guess the best, but the behavior is very odd. I just notice that it never gets deleted by FFS, but the create is successful every time. I would wager that that would result in an error if the file already existed.
