Question about rclone union copy times on OSX

Hello again,

First, thanks for rclone and animosity and all other posters for their configs and contributions.
I can't say I understand everything but I managed to set up a robust gdrive base encrypted remote for Plex on osX.

The implementation of rclone union since i last looked up to set everything up some months ago has been a true blessing for a Mac user, allowing to combine gdrive folder and local folder.

My question relates to rclone union and copy speeds, along with VFS cache settings on the mount command.

I observed the copy time to the rclone union remote on osx is kinda slow and I wonder if this would be a given or if there is a way to optimize my setup.
As I understand it, there is no Move but only Copy possible to the rclone union mount.

My setup is something like :

gdrive(rclone) --> gcrypt(rclone) --> union(rclone - with last local folder on a 12tb raid setup).

My mount command is :

rclone mount --allow-other --buffer-size=1G --dir-cache-time 96h --log-level INFO --log-file /Users/yericus/Desktop/clone.log --timeout 1h --cache-dir=/Volumes/Linux/rclonecache --vfs-cache-mode writes runion: /Volumes/Raid/mountpoint

I indicated a cache-dir on a SSD volume (whose name is Linux for historical blabla).

Now I am curious if this cache-drive on another volume, however fast the raid drive and SSD might be, would maybe explain the slow copy times by sonarr and radarr to the Rclone union mount ?
Woudl it be better for the cache to be on the Raid drive too ?

Or is it just normal for a union rclone mount on osx to be kinda slow ?
This all happens on a late 2014 mac mini i7 with 8Gb of memory.

Try the latest beta (very shortly to become v1.49). We spent some time optimizing transfers on the local backend so that may make an improvement.

Thanks, will do that next week.
Spent the last 3 days just setting all collections properly and making sure everything works ok nose on the monitor so need to appear less geeky to the wife for a while ahah.

Should the VFS cache be specified on the same drive as the destination folder ?
What is exactly the process of the VFS cache actually ?

It looks like the files copied to the rclone union remote (to the last specified local folder), get copied in the VFS cache also, though I am not sure if that happens before or after the copy to the local folder.

If there is an optimal setup as to where to put the cache compared to the local folder used that would be good to know.
I mean, some people probably know that already, I am not sure about it all myself is all !

Have some problems with rclone sometimes crashing and the folder used as a mount point is not available anymore short orf a system restart, will try to figure that out in another thread.

Thanks for this great tool.

If you are running off SSD, it probably doesn't make much difference. If you are using HDD then a different drive is probably the highest performance. I would sweat it to much though.

The file goes into the VFS cache first, then gets "uploaded" to the backend.

You could try using VFS cach mode off or minimal to see if you can avoid this. (It depends on exactly how the files get copied)

The reason why should be in the log!

Hi Ncw,
Thanks for our informations.
Before finding out why rclone was crashing, I tried the latest beta as you suggested.

Now 2 things happened :
1 - the same mount command I used resulted in a crash in the current release verion of reclone, but does not crash with the beta, tried back and forth the different versions with the same mount command and it would systematically crash with the release.

2 - the latest beta (v1.48.0-227-g077b4532-beta) gives me an extremely strange behavior with plex : all accentuated filenames are found unavailable by plex, who founds the file but somehow can not analyse it or something ?The file is added in the library but no audio and video track seen by plex and file is marked unavailable.
This happens as the gdrive-crypt-rcloneunion-rclonemount I use shows the file appearing properly in the file system.

I just checked this behavior by taking one of the culprit files on my gdrive and copying it locally.
I added a new library with that file and refreshed it, the file was found correctly by plex who could play it.
I re uploaded that same file to reclone via my crypt copy command in a new folder in gdrive and then added this file to yet another new library ; the file is found and added but immediately plex is marking it as unavailable.

With the latest reclone beta on osx ALL my movies and tv series with an accentuated character are marked unavailable in plex, even though they are available in the mounted union !
I have no idead how that can be,
I use my mountpoint on a non case sensitive APFS raid drive on osx.

I created another post on the subject here and will now try to run rclone with debug logs to post them.
The post is here :

Maybe will be easier to continue here.

Can you post the log somewhere? Also try with v1.49.0 which I've just released.

we'll move the discussion about accented characters to the other topic.

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