Many contacts - time to sync

[Jdville]

Windows XP - Outlook 2007 (no server)
MPE 1.8.2 Nightly 2/2/12
Samsung Galaxy S2
Client 1.0.17 beta 5

FJ - first of all, thank you for your work. MPE is the answer I need. You've got a great program!

But....I have lots of contacts (8500+) due to a couple of large groups that I manage & many years of business. While I understand this is a lot of contacts, I wonder why they can't sync faster (it takes 20-30 minutes & I don't "sync", just "Force Outlook > phone"). You posted in the last couple days to someone that this many contacts is too many even for the speed/power of today's smartphones.

Its not only slow for pushing them to the phone. The main problem is that the client has to walk throught all contacts to fnd changes. And even for the Galaxy S2 this job is too big when you want to use 8000 contacts

But my old phone was dumb (Samsung Blackjack II) that ran Microsoft Mobile 6.1 - I synced with Outlook using ActiveSync and it was incredibly fast (seconds) at syncing my Contacts. Obviously, the "comparing" of data was handled in my desktop computer & not in the phone. And the data transfer must have been quick as well. Is there something that could be done to MPE to make it work that way? I can't get rid of my big list of Contacts. Would probably need to get a non-Android phone first (which I don't want to do).

[spile]

Have you tried waiting for the first sync to complete and then re-syncing? I find that after the first (slow) sync subsequent syncs are MUCH faster.

[FJ]

I wonder that it even works to sync 8500 contacts...

The problem is that there is no sync-logic implemented in the databases of Android so on every sync the client has to walk through all contacts to search changes and to build its own sync database. I did alot of performance increasing with every version but in general its technically not possible in Android to filter out the last changes easily cause there is no last-edited-timestamp available

[dvhttn]

I wonder that it even works to sync 8500 contacts...

The problem is that there is no sync-logic implemented in the databases of Android so on every sync the client has to walk through all contacts to search changes and to build its own sync database. I did alot of performance increasing with every version but in general its technically not possible in Android to filter out the last changes easily cause there is no last-edited-timestamp available

This sounds like an extremely brain-dead way to implement things (on Android's side that is, NOT MPE's ...). Would it be possible to download ALL contacts to the phone when doing an initial download (when forcing PC -> phone) and then having the database build happen in the background on the phone? That way the user would not have to sit and wait for everything to complete (we all have better things to do I'm sure, like drink beer ... ) and there would be no need for any wifif/USB cable handshaking.

For contacts and calendar?

Is this feasible?

[FJ]

Pushing the whole data to the phone would need even more time i think. The datastructure is brain-dead for tools like MPE which are able to manage all data from all accounts on the phone. From Googles perspective its not brain-dead cause if you own your own account then you can use a sync-dirty flag. In case that MPE would host its own accounts then he could use also this flags but only for the data which would be in the MyPhoneExplorer-Account. I simply had no time to implement this functionality