I’ve just released beorg 3.39.3.
At first glance this might look like a very small update — a point release to a point release — but I’m hoping it will have a bigger impact than the version number suggests, particularly if you sync a lot of files.
The biggest change is that sync should now be noticeably faster. During testing I saw Dropbox sync complete in around half the time in some cases, especially with larger collections of Org files. If you’ve ever found yourself waiting for sync to finish before getting on with your day, hopefully this update will make things feel a little snappier.
Other changes in this release include:
For those interested in what’s changed behind the scenes, there are two main improvements.
When beorg syncs with Dropbox it needs to retrieve information about your files before deciding what needs to be downloaded or uploaded.
Previously beorg requested information for 100 files at a time. In 3.39.3 that has been increased to 1,000 files at a time. This significantly reduces the number of Dropbox API calls needed during a sync, particularly for larger file collections.
There are still further optimisations for Dropbox sync that I’ll continue to look at.
While investigating sync performance I also found some code that was asking the file system about files repeatedly for every .org file being processed, and these were some fairly slow operations.
That code has now been optimised so that some of this information is cached and reused instead of being requested each time. It’s a fairly small change internally, but it can shave a second or two off sync times depending on the size of your setup.
As always, thank you to everyone who reports bugs, sends suggestions and helps test new releases. I appreciate all the feedback, and I hope this update makes beorg feel a little faster and smoother to use.
