Workspace Sync returns empty screen

[Frank.HallWQLC5]

In a nutshell, when I run the Workspace Sync, it spends maybe 20mins thinking and then shows a screen with zero changes even though there will be plenty. (Vault 2023.3.1).

At this time, we have around 20,000 files locally on our machines while we're checking in^ Top Levels - I totally appreciate that this will slow things down and I have had WSSync work successfully several times in the past month or so since our Vault was set up, however I would not expect it to simply show nothing. 

^Imagine opening a Top Level that's not in Vault yet but all the working files have been deleted locally because they're all in Vault, the Top Level will complain that it can't see any of the files it needs. So until this stage of our Vault implementation is complete, our Parts, Mounts & Components will need to remain locally.

A colleague of mine has just run the Workspace Sync on his machine and it populates correctly - loading up the list of changes took maybe 2mins and showed, as expected, things like Managed files to be deleted, Unmanaged files to be deleted and new changes to download. This hopefully rules out issues with the Vault Server/proves that side of things is working, and so on.

Any ideas how to diagnose what's going on?

Cheers,

Frank.

[Frank.HallWQLC5]

A quick update.

The issue also occurs for my colleague mentioned before, he experiences exactly the same story as me, a blank screen after maybe a 10-20mins period, but this issue only occurs when we select "Latest Version".

[Frank.HallWQLC5]

A fundamental issue that Autodesk should address is that the Workspace Sync settings are only available once it completes an initial scan or times out. It might be coincidence but it seems like the timeout is set as 1000s (16m 40s) which is a long time to wait in order to get at the settings. To clarify, the 2nd screengrab in my original post is the window I'm forced to look at for all this time before it finally shows an empty window. It never makes it onto the 2nd task "Retrieve file information".

It would be much better if there was an initial window with the Settings button and a Scan button, rather than diving straight into a scan.

[Frank.HallWQLC5]

Update for anyone who might come across this issue in the future - it is now resolved.

Firstly to confirm that the default timeout of 1000s was the culprit. Initially this was reduced to 30s which helped massively when trying to diagnose the issue with Workspace Sync. However it has since been increased again now Workspace Sync is fixed because this setting also affects other things such as the uploading/Checking In of files into Vault - consider the upload speed over VPN when working from home, with a large file, as one possible worst case scenario. For any consultants doing fresh Vault implementations in the future - I'd highly recommend reducing this timeout immediately to something more modest to begin with, like 120s - it can always be increased again later.

Now for the actual fix.

I'd recommend discussing this with your IT department and with your reseller before making changes, as there may be knock on consequences that the following change could cause that I'm not aware of.

I want to also highlight that we spent months trying to troubleshoot this issue, countless hours trying to root cause it, before our reseller eventually organised a call with Autodesk, who then tweaked this 1 setting (after ruling out other things of course).

Within SQL Server Management Studio, our Compatibility level was set to 2016, and changing it (downgrading it) to 2012 fixed Workspace Sync. I have been warned that migrating to future releases of Vault Server will likely revert this back to 2016 so it may need changing back to 2012 again.

Finally we put this long-standing issue to bed, and FYI - it runs just fine with ~24,000 files saved locally, over VPN, working from home or on site, and only takes a few mins to run.