[Bug]: Excessive disk writes on macOS

[wotschofsky]

⚠️ Before submitting, please verify the following: ⚠️

• This is a bug, not a question or a configuration issue.
• This issue is not already reported on Github (I've searched it).
• Nextcloud Server and Desktop Client are up to date. See Server Maintenance and Release Schedule and Desktop Releases for supported versions.
• I agree to follow Nextcloud's Code of Conduct

Bug description

Similar to issue #1638 from almost 3 years ago I am still seeing high disk writes regularly exceeding 100gb/day. That is with minimal sync activity.
Unlike the mentioned issue CPU usage is very much within reason.

I have been monitoring this issue over the last few month but even after a fresh install it still persists.

Steps to reproduce

1. Install desktop client on macOS
2. wait

I am running on Apple Silicon

Expected behavior

Nextcloud disk writes are kept to only downloaded files and some overhead for settings and the local database. For most people this should be single digit gigabytes or less per day.

Which files are affected by this bug

-

Operating system

Mac OS

Which version of the operating system you are running.

macOS 12.5

Package

Distro package manager

Nextcloud Server version

24.0.3

Nextcloud Desktop Client version

3.5.4 (Installed through Homebrew)

Is this bug present after an update or on a fresh install?

Fresh desktop client install

Are you using the Nextcloud Server Encryption module?

Encryption is Disabled

Are you using an external user-backend?

• Default internal user-backend
• LDAP/ Active Directory
• SSO - SAML
• Other

Nextcloud Server logs

No response

Additional info

For now I have not attached the debug archive as that contains names of files and directories and therefore private information.

[isdnfan]

possibly same root cause as #5302

[joshtrichards]

Hi @wotschofsky - Are you still experiencing this? If so, can you isolate what type of activity/transactions are taking place based on your logs?

[wotschofsky]

Yes and no. While running 3.13.4stable (build 25658) over the span of 3 days, I now only saw ~90 GB written, so that's already a huge improvement! Though that's still without any major sync activity.

When exporting debug logs, I found that for some seconds, there were thousands of entries. So there's a good chance it's related to #5302.

Maybe as another hint: Some files get regularly rejected with a 500 error by the server, and could therefore cause a log entry.

[joshtrichards]

Some files get regularly rejected with a 500 error by the server

Do you know what is triggering the 500 errors? What's the Nextcloud server-side log say about those transactions?

[wotschofsky]

These errors are only for dotfiles.
The logs state "permission denied" while copying from the upload cache to the final destination. I have yet to figure out why this occurs. I assume it's related to my SMB storage (Hetzner Storage Box) mounted as Docker volume.