Fork syncing is slow

Jan Markowski

Recently we update Stash from v2.12.1 to v3.9.1.

Everything went smoothly, but what I'm noticing now is that when I merge a pull request into a "root" repository, the "forks" aren't synced as quickly as before. It may take about 5-10 seconds now, whereas before it was practically immediate.

Can anything be done to improve the fork sync speed?

Bryan Turner

Jan,

I'm one of the Stash developers, and the author of the fork syncing feature. Stash 3.3 revised how fork syncing is processed on the server. It also introduced a 30 second delay between when changes are made and when fork syncing runs to try and apply them in forks that have it enabled.

Fork syncing is a balancing act between the load it produces on the server and the usefulness it provides to developers. When multiple operations are received within that 30 second delay, fork syncing is able to internally combine them and synchronize them all in a single step, resulting in less load on the server.

Why 30 seconds? Because I didn't want to add a long delay, because the longer the delay is the more it impacts the usability of the feature, but I wanted some delay. The delay was based on the fact that we frequently see people push a change to a branch involved in a pull request, then go merge the pull request (often deleting the pull request's branch at the same time). That means if we did the processing immediately we'd likely run 2 or 3 different sync steps, but with a 30 second delay we most likely cover all of them at once.

At the moment there is no way to disable the 30 second delay. It wouldn't be difficult to add, though. You might consider raising a feature request at jira.atlassian.com.

Best regards,
Bryan Turner
Atlassian Stash