Excessive PROPFIND connections #2

📱 Desktop & mobile clients
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1

Hi.

I want to get a better understanding of the Nextcloud desktop client behavior. I am seeing excessive PROPFIND logs from a server perspective (isolated to one user) which is causing performance issues on the server; performance issues which I suspect are caused by memory saturation. Server issues aside, I want to understand what triggers a PROPFIND specifically (and what it is) as I feel the server issue is more of an artifact of the desktop client perhaps acting a little too aggressively.

Essentially, what I am observing from the effected user is this:

PROPFIND to usershare
PROPFIND to usershare/folder1
PROPFIND to usershare/folder1/folder2
PROPFIND to usershare/folder1/folder2/folder3
PROPFIND to usershare/folder1/folder2/folder3/folder4

In this order, I’m seeing these same 5 PROPFINDS every 3 seconds or so, which to me seems very excessive? I understand that when this server performance issue / PROPFIND logs happens, the user is running some streaming software which is modifying a lot of files in folder4 (assumed behavior of the streaming client). However, even with this in mind, I can’t see why this would trigger so many PROPFINDS (but I’m saying this without really knowing what they are, it does seem excessive though?). I can’t see any PUT logs during this period either which I assume I would see during a sync if there were any file changes?

The user has also reported a CPU spike desktop side of between 5 - 20% whilst this happens. The user is running the Windows client 3.14.1 (I don’t feel it was introduced in this version though).

I see a similar thread about similar behavior from years ago (not sure if related): Excessive propfind connections

Can anyone shed any light? Thanks

2

As far as I know, the clients trigger these requests regularly. Now it depends how many clients you have connected, there is the notify push server that can be used to handle this load more efficiently.

With client 3.14.x in particular, there were quite a few bugs, so if that is just new since this client version came out, it might be a bug. They are still working on a number of bugs, perhaps check the bug tracker for such issues as well.

Most smaller and private setups probably don`t use a dedicated push server and still work without larger issues. So if you have a small single user setup, there is probably a larger issue somewhere.