Scanning every minute - why?

Off-Topic
#1

Not going to ask for it to be changed or to give the option to be an editable value because I’ve seen elsewhere that the devs don’t want to change it. So I’m posting in Off-Topic instead, just to try to understand: what is the reasoning behind Sonarr scanning the HDD every single minute for episodes?

In my case I’ve reverted to cron’ing it to only run for a couple of hours each day, afterwards shutting down automatically… And even though I’ve tried to see the reasoning behind this decision, I still can’t understand!

Thanks!

#2

There are two import related tasks:

Downloaded Episodes Scan - This is the legacy import method with was replaced by Completed Download Handling, there are few reasons to continue to use this, this interval can be changed in Download Client settings and the recommended interval is 0 and having the path disabled (Use Manual Import to import one of files)

Check For Finished Download - This is the task that runs for Completed Download Handling, which doesn’t directly touch the disk unless a blackhole client is used or there is something to import. Without a way to dynamically adjust when it runs based on there being downloads in queue increasing this interval would mean Sonarr can’t track downloads effectively and could not realize something is in the queue.

There is an issue for dynamically adjusting it, but it’s complicated:

2 Likes
#3

Oh.

First of all, thanks for taking the time to pen your reply.

So if I’m getting this right, I had understood it all wrong; I thought that Finished Download scanning referred to disk scanning, but now it’s obvious that it just queries the torrent client?

Thanks - that puts my mind at ease, and as a bonus I learned something new. Now I’ve got to find out exactly what the black hole method is :smiley:

Thanks again!

1 Like
#4

Yes, it just queries the torrent client api (if that torrent client decides to hit the disk as a result, obviously we can’t do anything about that).
However, torrent clients are often seeding, so that would hit the disk anyway.

The Blackhole torrent client is just two folders, one where sonarr dumps the .torrent files (so that an unsupported torrent client can pick it up), and a folder where Sonarr scans for files that are ready for import.
It’s basically the only way to make an unsupported torrentclient work with Sonarr, but it’s a fallback scenario that should be avoided whenever possible since there are a couple of downsides.

#5

A bit late, but thanks for the explanation man. Learn something new every day :slight_smile: