Unity Collab is unacceptably slow

I have been using Unity Collab for a while. On smaller projects, it was functioning fine, but now I am on an 8GB project (Still not that large in my opinion). Since adding other users to my collab seats and sharing changes with one another we have encountered the following issues:

• Every time we open unity it takes 5 minutes for it to "Check for changes" before it starts the project.
• If we upload a change to a scene, it sends straight away. However "Syncing" the change on the other end spends 2 minutes in "Application.Tick" then spends 2 seconds actually downloading the change (The changes are normally a few kb in size).
• The same 2 minutes is spent if you have conflicts and choose either take source or take remote. (This is for EVERY single conflict you have to address).
• We usually have to push our changes twice as the first attempt fails 75% of the time.

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I am assuming these are bugs because for a paid product these are not acceptable problems. It really slows down our workflow significantly.

Our project version is 2020.1.2f1, we have 4 people using collab seats.

 

Hi @Keeul, thank you for your feedback!

It sounds like you could benefit from giving the v2.1 preview package of Collaborate a try. It replaces the automatic check for changes with a manual check, which removes the periodic check that you've been running into. You can find it by opening the Package Manager window from the Window menu, and on the gear icon at the top right of that window next to the search bar, click on Advanced Project Settings. From there, you can scroll down to Enable Preview Packages. Once that's all done, you can go back to the Package Manager window, expand the Unity Collaborate section and then click on See Other Versions to view the preview packages of Collaborate. Keep in mind that v2.0 is not supported on Unity 2020.1+ so you'll need to grab the latest v2.1 preview package.

With regards to the syncs taking a while to finish after updating or resolving a conflict, that is an unfortunate side effect of the asset import pipeline taking a while to recompile and import any modified assets. There is work being done by that team to improve the time it takes to reimport modified assets.

Lastly, with the pushes failing 75% of the time for you, what errors are you seeing when they fail? It may be that the publishes are too large and are timing out, in which case publishing a subset of your changes should alleviate this issue.

I also highly recommend taking a look at Plastic SCM and it's new Unity Integration Plugin to see if it is something that you and your team might be interested in. Plastic SCM is geared more towards larger projects and offers more advanced features than Collaborate, which is designed more for simple project sharing. Our Support Team can help you with switching over if you run into any issues using the Migration Tool. You can contact them by doing the following:

1. Navigate to project on the Developer Dashboard.
2. Select Collaborate > Support from the left hand menu.
3. Click on Open a Ticket and fill out the support form.

 

Does my Collaborate licence allow me to use plastic scam or do I have to purchase that separately?

 

You of course have to purchase that separately, you think Unity cares about Teams Advanced customers getting any sort of benefits, even though they were screwed by Collaborate for years?

And please note that when Collaborate talks about cloud space, they mean Project size, while when PlasticSCM talks about cloud size, they mean repo size (which includes history), which is easily 5-6 times larger than your project size.

So your 20GB Collaborate project might need over 100GB in Plastic.

Also the migration process is quite buggy (on one computer it auto added a bunch of Unity relevant ignore rules, on another computer there were no ignore rules at all) and the migration process takes forever (it's been 2 hours, but at this point I'm starting to think it'll take days), even though the migration wizard talks about the migration taking 20 minutes.

 

I have to say that's incredibly disappointing. I guess we are stuck waiting until they make collab a useable product.

 

The error I get when uploading some commits is this:

[Collab] CreateRevisionValidator::MissingFileError: The following hashes were not found as uploaded files: ["c431092156801100087f8f982f28f5cd"]. Please email collabsupport@unity3d.com

Reuploading it fixes this problem.

 

@AcidArrow, if you're running into issues with the Migration Wizard then please contact the Plastic team regarding that on their Unity 3D forum section.

 

Yeah.

This is what they told us. We tried to tell you there are issues with our repo, some files that should had no history on the dashboard, and the export tool fails after attempting to export for days, but you always assured us there was nothing really wrong with the repo.

 

That is incredibly frustrating and I'm sorry it's taken this long to get proper support for this issue. I apologize for any confusion on my end. If Plastic is saying that there's an issue with the git repository then the Collab team will work to get that unblocked. Please submit a Support ticket with us so that we can get that process started.

 

@Keeul have you managed to get any real answer on this?
Just courious if I should revisit collaborate, last time we used it it was a mess, we use SVN currently.

 

You shouldn't. There have been 0 changes of consequence to Collaborate.

 

Oh well...
Guess I'll try plastic then.
Not sure if I'd trust Unity Technologies regarding version control after collaborate but it seems like the best option for now, SVN is starting to get pretty slow for our project size.
Thanks for the update!

 

We have been using plastic SCM since this thread and all I have to say is collaborate is hot garbage in comparison.

There was a decent adjustment period for my other colleagues for getting up to speed on how to use plastic and solutions to problems can be a bit difficult to find on the internet, but their support team are quick and have helped me fix 2 seperate issues.

Most importantly I can upload and download large changes quickly.