[FEATURE REQUEST] Alternative to the full scan of user files

[diocas]

As discussed on Thursday, I'm opening this issue so that we can follow up on this subject. As agreed, this needs to be discussed further.

Problem description

At CERN we provide a home directory to all of our users with 1TB and 1M inodes limit. Users also have access to Projects, that can have much higher limits.
Currently, the iOS client does a PROPFIND for each file the user has. Besides that, and unlike the Desktop Sync Client where adding a shared folder is done manually, when visiting the tab "shared with me" it also starts PROPFIND'ing other users/projects spaces. This can lead to millions of PROPFIND's to the server and a possible impact on the performance of both the client and the server.
This feature might also be unpractical in slow/unreliable connections, which are more common in mobile devices.

(as a side note, this amount of files should also be taken in consideration when doing performance tests on the app)

Possible solution

At this point, a solution is not clear and needs to be discussed. Maybe an option to disable this behavior would be good.

If the reason this is done in the first place is just so that the app can provide special functionalities - like the quick access menu -, maybe we could do it on the server side and use the computed values by all the clients, like iOS, Android and even Phoenix.

[michaelstingl]

I just checked with the new 11.4. Initial discovery uses ~10-15MB /10k files. This only needs to be done once. We aren't aware of performance issues in the iOS app that are caused by the scanning.

@diocas Default iOS app starts scanning in account root. Branded CERNBox desktop app starts scanning in /home subfolder. Would a branding parameter in the iOS app to also start in /home help?

I hope with the CS3APIS, we can get something more efficient to let clients know the current state of the remote account.

[diocas]

@michaelstingl Let's try and see it. As we agreed, I will create an internal ticket for a branded version.

[michaelstingl]

Currently, the iOS client does a PROPFIND for each file the user has

This is not the case. iOS app does a PROPFIND only for the folder, NOT for every file in the folder (similar to desktop app)

[diocas]

We're running tests on the branded beta app and the problem is that on the web we expose shares inside a hidden "__myshares" folder and projects inside "__myprojects". So, when we access the quick access menu, eventually the app starts propfinding inside those folders (which was what I observed earlier). And the idea was to have something similar in OCIS.

So it would be great to be able to disable this, which would mean disabling many of the quick access functionality (or, as I suggested, rely on the server for the functionality).

[michaelstingl]

@diocas please use internal ticket for discussion regarding your specific setup. As I remember, we wanted to discuss, if we can align with desktop, not stop the scanning.