Wednesday, January 18, 2023

iCloud Syncing Limitations & Solutions

NetNewsWire:

With Apple’s limits, sync times can take hours and hours as they force limits on data transfer. The exact amount of time is dependent on the amount of data you have in iCloud.

Larger numbers of unread articles can cause a lot of data to be stored in iCloud. This is because we have to sync the article content of unread items.

[…]

Dealing with long sync times can be a little tricky on iPhones and iPads. These devices work hard to preserve battery life and don’t work well with long running processes. If you switch away from NetNewsWire or let your devices display go to sleep, you won’t complete a long running sync.

Our advice is do the following procedure right before you go to bed[…]

I find that syncing between Macs just works, even with a ton of data. With my iPhone, the app would always get stuck. After I removed some large feeds and marked some old posts as read, syncing did eventually complete, and it’s been quick to update ever since.

Previously:

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I sometimes find that lire takes a while to sync after a long time of non-use on a given device because the background refresh has somehow got stuck, and that I have to keep the device unlocked while this happens, but otherwise it just works with iCloud sync. AFAICT it only syncs the feed items themselves and their read/unread/star status, not the actual (full)text of the feed. And I have it purge articles after 30 days. This was nothing like the horrible experience I had with News Explorer, which practically gave me nightmares, and sounds a lot like what's happening here with NetNewsWire.

@Sebby: Syncing performance in News Explorer has been dramaticaly improved since version 1.11, by usage of data snapshots when the app is out of sync for a few days, or when it has never been synced before. In case there is not snapshot available, the initial sync is based on downloading unread data, before downloading the rest using the infamous slow CloudKit functions used by allmost all CloudKit apps.

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