[Fix Out] Checking for changes

Hi @GorkaChampion, I'm sorry for any confusion. Assuming that the Editor-side changes make it into 2018.3.10, then the prompt will be removed when v2.0 of the collab-proxy package is used along with at least 2018.3.10 of the Editor. If you use an older version of the package with that version of the Editor then the prompt won't be removed. Also, if you use v2.0 package with a version of the Editor older than 2018.3.10 then the prompt won't be removed. The fix needs both changes to work. Both changes should be out within the next two weeks. I hope that clears up everything.

 

Looking forwards!!

 

I've read the same thing from other Unity teams as well...

Are... are you sure the package manager was a good idea?

In any case, good luck with the release.

We're still using collaborate, but generally only because I haven't gotten the time to invest in a new solution, so I'm hoping that with this update collaborate will finally start working a bit better and save me from the trouble

 

Thank you for the progress update, @ryan_unity, and that is great news. I do not want to be greedy (seeing that infernal 'Checking for Changes' progress bar for the last time will be fantastic), but do you know if the fixes will have an impact on the issue of the Unity Editor hanging for a while after each Collaborate update?

Thanks,
Matt

 

Hi @MattT5! You're very welcome. This fix should shorten any hangs or freezes from updates, but more work is planned to directly address those issues and completely remove them shortly after we get this fix out. Thank you again for your patience.

 

Thanks for the update @ryanc-unity !
Will download 2018.3.10 when it's ready.

 

You need to backport this to 2017.4. It is your *only* LTS release so far, after all.

Otherwise it demonstrates that having a version control system thoroughly integrated into the editor is a bad idea, and that a 3rd-party solution (ie. Git) is the best approach.

 

*cough* ?

 

Unity 2018.3.10, check! Standing by for Collaborate v2.0.0 package.

 

Amazing! One day they will be able to display numbers bigger than 9!

But come on Collaborate! Package please

 

We're working with release management to get the package out and are hoping to have it within the next couple of days. We'll let you know once we have a better ETA and/or it's out.

 

The 2.0 package is now out! Check out the release notes / known issues post for more information. Thank you guys for your patience while we worked on this fix.

 

Ok, I see 2.0 is inPreview, is it stable or we may better wait some more?

Great news, anyway!!

 

Hmm... with Unity 2018.3.10 and the v2.0 Collaborate package, taking a 1KB update still locks up the editor for almost 2 minutes:

Any additional debug info I can provide? Network connection is strong.

Project size is ~50MB:



Project file count is ~5,000 files:



(The monkeys folder is just a bunch of copies of a little .jpg of a monkey, to simulate a normal project file count total.)

Here's the project:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/quccbxt71voh3g3/Collaborate Speed Testbed.zip?dl=0

Bug Case ID 643900:
https://support.unity3d.com/hc/en-us/requests/643900

Project UPID:
93a7b321-cb1d-4ab0-919b-92bfa2c7e399

 

Hi @AdamKane! That looks like an issue that's unrelated to the changes in v2.0 of the package. This sounds [COL-28] where updates can take a long time on larger projects. Unfortunately we don't have a workaround for this bug at this time (outside of reducing your project's total size) but it is on our list of issues to address after getting v2.0 out. Can you please confirm the size of your project for us, just the Assets folder, so that we can be sure that we're dealing with the same issue?

 

Hi @RyanC, the slow-to-update test case project size is ~50MB:



Here's the project:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/quccbxt71voh3g3/Collaborate Speed Testbed.zip?dl=0

But, the project file count is just over 5,000.

Hmm... maybe the issue is:

• [COL-353] Projects with a large number of files (~8000+) may see high CPU usage when file changes are made within the project.

My team has had good luck getting all of our total project file sizes down below 2GB, but we've not been able to get those same projects' file count below about 5,000 files total.

Bug Case ID 643900:
https://support.unity3d.com/hc/en-us/requests/643900

Project UPID:
93a7b321-cb1d-4ab0-919b-92bfa2c7e399

 

After only doing some limited testing with v2.0 today, I ended up reverting back to 1.2.16. It seems like v2.0 is a bit of a CPU hog (even if Unity isn't in focus), and often times unexpectedly will spike the CPU to ~50% even when idling on a blank/new test scene.

Is there a reason why v2.0 appears to be significantly less efficient than previous versions of Collaborate?

 

Had a great moment this morning when I saw that a new version of Collaborate got available witn 2018.3.10. And now, having bad times in El Collaborate. CPU usage is ridiculously high and working is almost impossible. We had to down-grade too. Too bad.

 

I'm guessing it's because it's Async.

I also found that instead of popping up "checking for changes" every 15 minutes as it usually does, now it does it in the background, which would be fine, but it makes the editor almost unresponsive anyway, so not sure what I gained by upgrading to the 2.0.0 package.

 

Hm, I guess we will be staying with the old version for now...

 

So I tried it once more, thinking, maybe I was too quick to jump to conclusions, maybe I was affected by the previous posters, maybe if I wait a bit the cpu usage will settle.

So I tried again on a Mac this time...

Now collaborate doesn't even work properly. I can pull changes done in other computers, but I can never push changes. I change stuff, and the icon never changes to the blue icon that lets me upload.

I thought I'd wait, maybe it was doing a "checking for changes" in the background, and that would finish, but I've been waiting for around 25 minutes and I still can't upload anything.

 

Tried again with the newly released 2018.3.11, same thing, doesn't work.

 

Thanks for your reports - The team has been investigating the high CPU usage and implemented a couple of changes that got us a 50% speedup in our test scenario (bulk rename of 1,000 files at once) and a 20% reduction in peak CPU usage. This isn't enough of an improvement just yet, so we're still working on more fixes before releasing a hotfix.

@AcidArrow - This isn't something we've seen internally but @ryanc-unity is currently attempting to repro so that we can address it. He will likely be in contact with more questions throughout the day.

 

@StaceyH @ryanc-unity

Some more data points:

1. In a new empty project, 2.0.0 was working fine (well, cpu was high)

2. After that I re-opened my main project, upgraded to package 2.0.0, and... it was working (?!). Like immediately, it was showing it wanted to upload the manifest, and as soon as I did a change, that one was added to the list like it should.

3. I closed Unity and re-opened it. Now Collaborate was not working again, it stayed with the Green icon no matter what changes I did locally. Remote changes were coming in properly though as I mentioned previously.

4. I tried disabling and re-enabling collaborate and it popped up a "Hold on. Preparing your project for collaborate" dialogue. I think it's stuck there (I've waited 20+ minutes). Weirdly, the editor is functional behind the progress bar.

5. The mac is a 2012 mac mini running 10.14.3. It has 16gb of ram a 2.7ghz i7 and an SSD. I mean it's an old machine, but it's not really that slow.

6. I didn't do extensive testing on Windows, but Collaborate was working there in the test I did yesterday. I'll try again later and update here.

7. CPU usage is generally crazy high:

but sometimes it's less than that (like in the 150-200% range). It's like it has two modes. At first I thought it had something to do with whether it was working properly or not, but it doesn't.

EDIT: 8. Other stuff like rolling back to previous commits does work fine.

 

Hi @AcidArrow! Thank you for the great feedback and updates on how the package is performing for you. When you've noticed that the Collab Toolbar never seems to update, have you tried entering and exiting Play mode in Unity to see if the Toolbar starts updating again? We've noticed that works in some cases when the Toolbar is failing to update with this package. The Toolbar does take some time to update after a project has started since Collab is busy doing the check for changes in the background, but normally after it finishes then the Toolbar starts updating closer to a regular interval so I'm surprised that it doesn't seem to be updating at all for you even when waiting for several minutes.

Would you be alright with letting us borrow your project for testing purposes? You can message me your project's UPID if you're comfortable with that. It's easier to try to repro the issue using the same project as opposed to recreating it.

 

Clarification: It's not that it never seems to update, it always updates for incoming changes, it doesn't update for local changes, as such I am not able to upload stuff. (but everything else works)

I tried it now, it didn't change anything.

You should already have our project from a different ticket/bug report from months ago (the freezing/hanging issues on Windows), but sure, I'll message you the UPID in a bit.

 

Hello! I wanted to provide an update on the 2.0 package:

To summarize - we are having issues with the libraries we're using not scaling as well as we'd like which is causing an increase in CPU and latency. Next week we're releasing a new version of the package that should reduce the general CPU usage by about 30%. This is still not an ideal drop, so we're continuing to explore ways that we can further reduce CPU and latency times.

@AcidArrow, we've been looking into your issue as well - which has been a doozy! Unfortunately, we're still trying to identify what's causing the problem and why it seems to be isolated to your project. Our current theory is that there's a race condition that is causing the project to not initialize correctly. We're continuing to track it down and will let you know once we know more.

 

Sincere thanks for the update.

Not a ton of us are commenting but many of us are definitely monitoring. Collaborate is definitely in a messy state it feels like from my team's perspective, and I imagine that stretches towards most teams using it, so being informed of the progress on this is a make or break for many of us at this point.

 

Was so disappointed with the 2.0 update we took a day to move everything to github. Should have done it a long time ago, Collab is nothing but a disaster.

 

I'm experiencing the same thing AcidArrow is with 2.0. Even though I know I have changes, it indicates I am up to date and doesn't detect I have anything to publish.

 

Are you also on a Mac? Also how big is your project roughly?

 

As I mentioned last week, we've released v2.0.0-preview-8 which improves CPU usage by ~30%. We're still working on more improvements and will provide an ETA on the next update as soon as we can. Release Notes and known issues can be found here.

 

Hi all,

We’ve identified an issue that could be causing a lot of the pain here. In your projects, there is a file which Collab uses to determine what to ignore named “.collabignore”. That file was supposed to get updated with new content when upgrading to the 2.0 package, but there are cases where that does not happen correctly.

I am posting the correct default contents of that file below. The important lines that may be missing are these 4:


[Tt]emp/
[Ll]ibrary/
[Ll]ogs/
.*/



If you have custom ignore rules, please edit the .collabignore file in your project to add those 4 lines.

If you don’t have anything custom in the file, you can replace the entire contents with the following:


# ===========================
# Default Collab Ignore Rules
# ===========================

# OS Generated
# ============
.DS_Store
._*
.Spotlight-V100
.Trashes
Icon?
ehthumbs.db
[Tt]humbs.db
[Dd]esktop.ini

# Visual Studio / MonoDevelop generated
# =====================================
[Ee]xported[Oo]bj/
*.userprefs
*.csproj
*.pidb
*.suo
*.sln
*.user
*.unityproj
*.booproj

# Unity generated
# ===============
[Oo]bj/
[Bb]uild/
[Tt]emp/
[Ll]ibrary/
[Ll]ogs/
sysinfo.txt
*.stackdump
.*/

 

Hi, yes, that's the issue. Adding these makes Collaborate work reasonably fast (it takes a couple of minutes to see the local changes the first time).

Although there is another potential issue. I'm guessing something changed between versions, I'm guessing you previously had it hardcoded to only look in a couple of folders and now it relies more on .collabignore.

So the problem is, there are other folders in the project. The memory profiler keeps snapshots in a "MemoryCaptures" folder. Screenshots we grab get put into a "ScreenShots" folder.

These are not things that we wanted versioned and uploaded to collab and I'm not crazy about having to add everything to .collabignore.

 

I was hoping that maybe there was a free win here, but unfortunately (at least in my case) all of these lines both are currently part of my project's ignore file and were back when I was running my previous v2.0 tests, so the reported CPU issues were unrelated to missing default ignore rules.

Are the missing lines other people may be experiencing due to another new v2.0 bug?

 

Correct, unfortunately the CPU issues are unrelated to the missing lines. This is the workaround for the issue that @AcidArrow and @Rofar34 were reporting.

We released an update to 2.0 yesterday that should help some with the CPU issues (reduces it by ~30%) and are still working on bringing it down even more. (We wanted to get some improvements out to you guys ASAP.)

You are correct, we've come to rely on the .collabignore file more due to changing over the snapshot to be based on git. This is more inline with the experience that you get when using other VCS (i.e. .gitignore) in that you'll need to add files/folders to it that you don't want published. For many of our customers, this was an improvement as we got a lot of feature requests to be able to include other folders.

 

@AcidArrow Since the collabignore file is using standard gitignore syntax, you should be able to adjust it to go back to the old behavior by using a whitelist approach instead of a blacklist approach. So you would whitelist Assets, Packages, and ProjectSettings directories. That would make it less of a headache to manage.

This is a good article on how that works: https://jasonstitt.com/gitignore-whitelisting-patterns

Here is what I tested that worked in my project. I tacked this on to the end of existing rules to keep the desired file extensions ignored.

# Ignore everything
*
# Allow descent into directories
!*/
# Whitelist the directories as they were in older Collab versions
!Assets/**
!ProjectSettings/**
!Packages/**
!/.collabignore

 

Looks like maybe my collabignore was updated. My custom ignore rules are no longer there and the all the rules posted above are in there. So that will not help with my issue.

@AcidArrow I am on windows and my project size is rather large.

 

@Rofar34 Do you have a file in the project root called "collabignore.txt"? If your old one was replaced on upgrade, that should be the backup that would have your custom rules in it.

EDIT: Also with regard to the continuing broken behavior, can you send us a support email? We can dialog faster that way. collabsupport@unity3d.com and please mention that you are seeking further help from this forum thread. We'll watch for it.

 

I do have the txt file backup and saw that but I also had my own backup of the project specific ignores I created so I just put them back in from that.

I have a few things I am going to try over the next day or 2. Depending on the outcome of that, I will either update here or send a support email.

 

Is there an update to when 2.0 is presumed to be stable? Preview 8 is not viable for me since it keeps eating 30% of my CPU (i7 7700K) and makes the Unity Editor scene view FPS very low.

 

Hi @Alterego-Games! We're hard at work on a new update to the 2.0 preview that will cut the high CPU usage dramatically. Right now we're in the process of testing this new preview and hope to get it out soon.

 

So @ryanc-unity, how goes the testing? In case you can't tell, we're eager for an update

 

I am triple-eager!

 

Hey @ChaosResolution and @MattT5! We've discovered a few more critical bugs that needed to be fixed during our last round of testing. We're working on fixing those now and, assuming the next test pass goes well, we're targeting next week. This is of course subject to change, and if it does we'll let you know. Thanks for your patience!

 

I'm experiencing a problem where it looks as though collab is scanning but nothing happens.
If I open the Collab window there's a please wait & scanning for changes message but having left this running for 2 hours nothing happens which means I cant upload changes.
Currently trying 2.0.0 preview 12.

EDIT: There is no significant CPU usage to say that unity is actually doing anything (ie my full system is at 2% and editor shows 0.4%)

 

Hi @pcg! Did you make sure to restart your project after installing v2.0.0-preview.12? Some functionality requires a restart after installation to ensure that the correct backend system is being used. Have you tried pressing the rescan button at the bottom of the Collab Toolbar to see if the scan finishes?

 

Hi @ryanc-unity Yes I have done both what you suggested. I should point out I was trying this on 2019.1.0.f2.
I'm currently downloading 2019.1.1f1 and will try again.

Thanks.

 

Thank you for trying both of those. While waiting for 2019.1.1f1 to finish downloading, can you check if you have any compiler errors in your Console?

 

TLDR;
2.0.0 preview-12 seems ok so far in 2019.1.1f1.


Sorry, I already launched the project in 2019.1.1f1 before seeing your reply.
The latest version of unity crashed when I tried to open my project. When I tried a second time it opened the project but took over 2hrs to fire up. When it did get going there were lots of errors relating to some assets I own. I fixed these and removed a few things and restarted unity.
It then opened without errors and when I tried collab it worked
I had changed my .collabignore to reflect the base example one above but this included a lot of stuff I didnt want to include so I've changed collabignore to reflect the whitelist example above.
I will let you know if I encounter any problems but so far so good.

Thanks.