I routinely use Unison to sync users' home directories between workstations where the user is expected to work. Unfortunately, as the firm grows, the Unison become slower and slower in determining what files have changed. The time taken by actual transfer is negligible in comparison.
The synchronization is done in the star topology, with RAID-6 unison server in the center. Some workstations use Windows (with NTFS), some Linux with either Ext-4 or BTRFS(!).
At the time of writing, there is one user, whose home directory is 45GB large with 100K files, and the full synchronization time takes about 30 minutes for him. Note, that simple directory traversal with find >null
takes less about 2 minutes.
What are the strategies for further speeding up the process? (except reducing the number of files to sync) I believe that in theory the Unison can be sped up, but the fastcheck
option isn't enough.