7 ms·
AeroFS is x87 faster than Dropbox in LAN syncing [video]
- georgebashi 14y agoThis is one of my major annoyances with Dropbox — I'd love to shift everything to my Dropbox, but the slow sync speed is painful. I signed up a long time ago for an AeroFS invite but had no joy. Anyone got one they could share? I'd love to try this out.
- cool-RR 14y agoSent you an invite :)
- georgebashi 14y agoReceived! Thanks! I noticed from your profile you wrote LOGO for python — I did the same for processing! http://terrapin.sourceforge.net/ http://terrapin.sourceforge.net/ Great minds :)
- checker659 14y agoCan I have an invite too? Pleeaassseee. :)
- cool-RR 14y agoSure, I'll just send it to the email address that you've conveniently included in your profile. Oh wait :)
- checker659 14y agoOk. Updated. (Also, sorry!!)
- cool-RR 14y agoI'm all out of invites by now, sorry.
- cool-RR 14y agoUpdate: Got more invites, sent you one.
- checker659 14y agoThanks man!! You're awesome. :)
- zgubi 14y agocan I have one as well, please?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- cool-RR 14y agoI'm all out of invites, sorry.
- gerrynjr 14y agoIf anyone else has an invite, I wouldn't mind trying this out
- antr 14y agoI love AeroFS. Although it is missing many of Dropbox's features (e.g. web storage of files, better version history, etc), the fact that it is extremely fast and there is no cap on P2P sync makes it my weapon of choice when sharing files/folders with colleagues.
- FireBeyond 14y agoSounds like exactly what I need - and what I usually use Dropbox for. If anyone could spare me an invitation...
- cool-RR 14y agoI'll be happy to invite you, but I don't have your email address.
- FireBeyond 14y agorobert@chromablue.net
- stcredzero 14y agoWhat would this get someone who already has Dropbox and Air Drop on OS X? Answer: compatibility! Now that walled gardens are going up, there's pain in getting through the walls. If they can make this compatible with Dropbox, it would be a great combination. There's also the possibility that Dropbox could add Bonjour/Rendevous to their client side software, reducing AeroFS to just a feature.
- newman314 14y agoNot really, the attraction of AeroFS is not having a connection/reliance on S3. So for something like 1Password syncing, it would be great not to have a copy sitting somewhere in the cloud.
- mikeash 14y agoIf you use a strong master password, and given that 1Password uses a secure key-derivation function, does it really matter if your 1Password file is sitting somewhere in the cloud?
- newman314 14y agoYes. My take on it is if there is no/little benefit of putting something in the cloud, there is no reason to do so particularly if it's something security related.
- alistair75 14y agoJust tried this myself with a couple of 8.5MB MP3 files. One appeared on the second machine in about a minute, the other in about a minute 30. Not sure why this is taking upwards of 12 minutes for the OP.
- cool-RR 14y agoI'm jealous that on your computer, instead of being incredibly slow, it's only slow.
- tmx 14y agoOP probably didn't disable dropbox speed limiting - this is the default: http://i.imgur.com/wTWzG.png http://i.imgur.com/wTWzG.png
- alistair75 14y agoFor what it's worth, I haven't changed those settings on either of my machines.
- cool-RR 14y agoThanks for that tip. I disabled the limiting now and it sped up from 11:42 minutes to 01:40 minutes! Now Dropbox is only x12.5 slower than AeroFS. The real solution, of course, would be for Dropbox to transfer the file over the LAN immediately before waiting for it to be uploaded to the Dropbox servers.
- flurian 14y agoThat's not a solution, it's a design tradeoff. Dropbox's servers are the "truth", and the software's clear goal is to get a copy on the servers. There are many reasons for this--weird conflicts, inconsistencies, and so on--that are much harder to resolve than if there is a copy on the servers. Once that happens, other clients will ask to download from the servers, notice that it's on the LAN already, and take it from there. I bet if you install a new client on the same LAN, or share a folder between clients on the LAN, or add a folder to selective sync, once the files are already there... it will be a competitive speed.
- newman314 14y agoAeroFS looks cool but I'm not too keen on having to run Java just to run AeroFS given that I had disabled Java on MacOS due to the recent exploits.
- xyzzy123 14y agoI wouldn't worry about it. The Java to be disabling is the Java browser plugin, which allows un-trusted web sites to run applets in a sandbox on your machine. As you know, there have been a lot of issues with Java sandboxing. However, AeroFS runs locally (as far as I understand, I don't have an invite) so should be fine as long as you trust the provenance of the code.
- spartango 14y agoI believe those exploits are Java applets breaking out of the browser-plugin sandbox, which is designed to limit application access to even simple things like files and class loading. To be clear, these aren't strictly JVM vulnerabilities, and more plugin security-model vulnerabilities. Java "desktop" applications don't have such a sandbox and thus they already have access to things that the vulnerabilities enable (such as manipulating system properties). Really, we ought to treat Java desktop apps no differently than native binaries, bounded by the the OS' security model.
- mekwall 14y agoThis is like comparing apples and oranges. I'm inclined to think that the creator of this video is biased towards AeroFS.
- cool-RR 14y agoFunny, I'm actually biased towards Dropbox. I use it for most of my stuff because of the versioning and the Packrat feature. But there's no reason for Dropbox not to do direct LAN syncing, and no reason for AeroFS not to offer infinite versioning. It may be more complex to design, but definitely feasible. So I don't think that this is an apples-vs-oranges comparison.
- TillE 14y ago> But there's no reason for Dropbox not to do direct LAN syncing, and no reason for AeroFS not to offer infinite versioning. Really, no reason? None at all? For "infinite versioning", it's obvious - there's no upper bound on the amount of data the server has to store. Storage space costs money. As for no direct LAN syncing, someone's already mentioned the reason - consistency. Syncing is already a hard problem, and it's dangerous to allow more things to go wrong because the clients synced but the server didn't receive all the data.
- Dylan16807 14y agoSo what if there's no upper bound? Treat it like normal data and charge the normal price. Spideroak already does this.
- sepbot 14y agoPeople often misunderstand what the Dropbox LAN Sync does. The file needs to be already in the cloud before it can be synced over LAN. This means that when you add a new file, it will first get uploaded to Dropbox servers then transferred to other computers over LAN. Considering that most home connections are asynchronous (slow up, fast down) the entire processes gets bottle-necked by that slow upload rate.
- cool-RR 14y agoYou've given an excellent answer to the question Why is Dropbox's LAN Sync so slow? but the more interesting question is Why don't the Dropbox engineers change how LAN Sync works so it won't be so slow anymore?
- yskchu 14y ago+1 Also, uploading the data to Dropbox server, and then downloading again, wastes valuable quota for those under a data cap.
- Dylan16807 14y agoNo, it doesn't download it from the master server. It transfers directly between the computers on the LAN. The only thing that has to go through the Dropbox servers is the master file list.
- CJefferson 14y agoI can understand why, particularly given Dropbox's aim of being as simple as it can possibly be. At the moment the rule is simple. At the moment the cloud can be relied on as the authorative copy which everyone syncs with. If I have 3 or more local clients, all talking and sharing over LAN, many issues get very complicated.
- mnutt 14y agoIt seems like it could be mitigated by having the client hash the file and notify the cloud of the hash of the file it intends to upload first. But I think your explanation for why they don't currently do LAN-only sharing is correct.
- fox91 14y agoIt's nonsense, they are 2 different technologies
- martin-adams 14y agoWhat's the best way of writing this. Is it x87 or 87x faster? Thank goodness it wasn't x86 faster as that would have confused me. On a related note, I've been using Livedrive for a number of years now and they have a lan transfer option to obtain a file over the network than over the internet. I suspect however a lot of use cases are separated by the internet and generally aren't on the same network. What would be awesome however is if after the sync both computers were able to contribute to uploading the file to the live server. So I could sync my files over lan to my laptop, go to work, then have my home/work computer upload them to the net, thus 2x quicker to store it in the cloud. But that would be a bit of an edge use case I think.
- bigtones 14y agoI've always thought it's 87x as in 'eighty seven times' - the other way around makes it seem like a long lost Intel instruction set.
- mdellabitta 14y agox87 is the original FPU instruction set of the x86 family, so time to be confused again. But now you can be .75 confused instead of 1 confused.
- lutusp 14y ago> But now you can be .75 confused instead of 1 confused. A confusion index of 1.0 would be described as perfectly confused. But, as is often said, nothing is perfect. :)
- rgbrgb 14y agoWhat protocol does AeroFS use?
- Hotspam 14y agoI would love an invite if anyone could spare one. My email address is hotspam{at}gmail.com. I've been on the sign up list for over a year but haven't heard a thing. Thanks in advance!