Sync sending counts are very high

[Chris Ridd]

Hi,

Tap Forms for Mac 5.3.18 (Build 1854)

I’ve noticed that on my Mac a DB syncing to iCloud is currently reporting “Sync sending 3,773/94,617)” yet my forms in this DB have a total of 24,386 records. All my fields are text.

I’ve tried disabling iCloud syncing, then deleting the iCloud sync data (from prefs), and then compacting the DB (from prefs) but re-enabling syncing seems to keep finding 94,617 “things” to send.

What does 94,617 refer to, and is something wrong?

Thanks!

Chris

[Brendan]

The number you see there is not a record count. It’s actually a sequence number. Every time you make a change to a form, field, record, layout, layout item, search, etc. a new, incremented sequence number is generated.

So it’s really just a target number the sync system needs to reach for you to know that the sync is finished. It can also jump quickly up the line to reach that number or sometimes go more slowly. It just depends on the state of the database and the number of revisions made.

[Sam Moffatt]

If you’ve got a lot of links, each link is also a record for the purposes of sync (in addition to forms, fields, layouts, layout items, searches, scripts, categories, table rows and records being records for the purposes of sync). I have some documents that have more links than records in them :D

[Chris Ridd]

Good point Sam, however I’m not using links, only the default form, and almost no scripts.

[Chris Ridd]

Ah, thanks Brendan that does make sense. I was kind of wondering if there was some kind of historical change metadata in there as well and I was hoping the iCloud sync disables and deletes would purge that.

So my DB is essentially a copy of something online. I decided to refresh it yesterday, and because it was too hard/tedious to figure out a minimal set of deltas between the old data and new data, my approach was brute force:

1. Delete all records in each form (ie ~20k deletes)
2. Import new records into each form (is 24k adds)

I did a couple of extra test CSV imports and extra deletes, so getting to 94,617 things sounds in the right ballpark.

BTW syncing all these changes over to Tap Forms on the iPhone was kind of painful – the sync either stopped without errors, or TF crashed when I restarted it, and then the sync began again from 0 after a second restart. Hopefully you’ll get the crash reports via Apple.

Is there a smarter way for me to clear and reload all my forms?

[Brendan]

So deleting 20K records will basically cause a sync of 20,000 delete commands. Maybe use Nearby Sync for faster syncing than iCloud. Also after you delete a lot, if you run the Compact Database function, that’ll reduce the amount of data to sync and will shrink the database file size.

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