Syncany is a beast. Syncany is not just Dropbox or SparkleShare. Syncany actually does encryption of the data, they built the infrastructure for block chunking with deduplication, they have multiple backends. This is a feature full program; that isn't a simple thing. If you use ZFS with deduplication you need many gigabytes of memory and it's not doing encryption. Add the compression and you get even worse memory usage. People who have storage arrays of a few terabytes have systems with 16GB of RAM and the ARC Cache alone takes up 6 GB or so during normal usage. This is a fully featured program. ZFS in software almost. It's not something simple like Dropbox.
If you can come up with a closer analog than ZFS that uses much less RAM and has better startup times, I would love to see it. I've been looking for a while and still haven't found an optimal storage platform. If my Android phone, a memory limited device, can handle many complicated tasks and run fairly quickly, I don't think it's Java that's the problem. It's a combination of memory hungry, processor intensive features and bugs that need fixing. This is opensource. If you have such a strong opinion on what language should be used for this project, you are free to take it and port it. You have that freedom. With opensource, you are never in a position where you can demand or complain. Come with data, like a profile that shows where the code spends a lot of time or wastes a lot of memory. Come with a patch. We all want this to be better. One of the points of opensource is acknowledging that we aren't smart enough ourselves and we need help with this. Finally, when the new code is pushed, there will be better opportunities to target specific parts. If you want a daemon written in C or Python, it will be easier. This architecture issue is on the TODO and will make it much easier to tackle this type of problem. This way it will be easier to think of Syncany less as a specific program, like AIM, but more like a protocol, like XMPP. When a Syncany client is written for iOS, it will be written in Objective-C, when it's written for Android, it will be in Java, when it's the backend, there may be a couple of different backend implementations with different advantages. We will, hopefully soon, have that freedom. R. Mason [email protected] -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~syncany-team Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~syncany-team More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
