Hi,
I’ve just reinstalled my desktop and installed 1.4.9. I have over 1TB of data to download, but I’m on a fast fibre connection (1Gb/s). For some reason though insync seems to be stuck on 50Mb/s:
Most of those files are large files (0.5GB +) and I can see them coming down 4 at the time, but clearly it’s not using full available bandwidth.
Is there a way to speed the process up?
Probably nothing you or Insync can do. Google Drive’s public APIs come with restrictions.
You can try other third-party clients (e.g. rclone) to see if they have similar download speed. If so, then there’s basically nothing Insync can do to improve speed. If other clients are faster, then send support your log files so they can potentially find the problem.
If possible, you may consider using Google’s official sync client to download your files (at least for this initial download). Official clients use Google’s internal APIs, hence are privileged to be faster. You can then resync/merge these downloaded files with Insync. A resync without actual upload / download shouldn’t take very long.
I have insync running on a number of linux devices (using the headless client) and they don’t seem to show the problem (the same files would come down at 350-400Mb/s there). This one is running on a Mac, this is the only one I have that uses a gui and in the past I have not used it for large files, so perhaps there’s something I can do?
Hmmm, possibly.
Can you try using Insync to download these large files on the same account but onto your Linux devices now and check the speed?
In theory, large files should be faster to transfer, not slower. Also have you done a speed test on you Mac?
If there’s genuinely a difference in speed between headless and GUI clients, then it’s certainly something Insync’s dev team should take a look at and fix. But I’m not sure there’s anything you can do right now.
Hi,
Please see the graph:
This is interesting and probably useful data.
I’d send an email to support with Insync’s logs attached and with a link to this thread.
There’s possibly some issue with Insync’s Mac client.
One last thing I’d do to confirm this issue is to use another third party client (e.g. rclone) to download your files on your Mac and check the speed.
As for your immediate problem of getting data onto your Mac, as I suggested, I’d use anther client (preferably Google’s official client) to get the data down quickly, and later resync them in Insync.
Hey @pshemk!
Thanks for reaching out. Tagging our engineers @marte and @Camille to take a look at this. 
And as usual, thanks for the awesome responses @Hawk! 
Thank you for the suggestion to use another client. I’ve used Google Backup and Sync and the files were coming down at proper rate (over 350Mb/s).
As I work also with software projects that sometimes use tens of thousands of (tiny) files. I wanted to see how quickly I can sync them. With insync 10k files needs about 6-8h to upload (doing 4 at a time), with Google Backup and Sync I managed to sync almost 50k in the same time (on the same machine), so there’s definitely something going on.
