DEVONthink randomly freezes when using Bonjour sync

I have 4 main devices and wanted to setup bonjour between them to not rely so much on iCloud. My setup is a mac mini (server), MacBook pro, iPad and iPhone

The initial sync works fine but when I setup the iPhone / iPad to sync with my MacBook (my main machine), DEVONthink on my MacBook randomly just freezes and becomes unresponsive (beachball), the client then displays “server timeout” as sync error message. I have to force kill the app and restart for it to work again, then it works fine for a bit and randomly (can be minutes or hours) goes back into frozen state.

No problems with freezes at all when I don’t use bonjour and just iCloud.

This also happens more often when I put the MacBook to sleep (close the lid) and re-open it

What can I do to debug this?

My current bonjour setup is:

Macbook -> Mac mini
iPhone -> Mac mini + Macbook
iPad -> Mac mini + Macbook

Reason for this setup being that the mac mini is my home server, so at home I want to use that as well, but when I’m on the go with just the MacBook it should still sync locally.

Which version/edition of DEVONthink do you use and which version of macOS?

Ah I knew I forgot something.
DEVONthink Pro 3.5
Macbook is Catalina on 10.15.4

If this should happen again then please launch Apple’s Activity Monitor application (see Applications > Utilities), select the frozen DEVONthink 3 in the list of processes, choose the menu item View > Sample Process and send the result to cgrunenberg - at - devon-technologies.com. Thanks in advance!

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As it’s always with debugging issues, I had this problem for a really long time but as soon as I get instructions to sample the process, there are no freezes anymore.

I’ll report back when it happens again.

Probably a Heisenbug - it disappears as soon as you observe it :slight_smile: