Frequency of "up-to-date" checks is insane

Bug graveyard
1

Apologies if this is a wrong place. The frequency of “app is up to date” checks seems suggesting Obsidian has an OCD. Would you consider making it a configurable parameter?

You see, I work in terminal and having console window constantly spammed by those checks is more than annoying. If the editor is used in same terminal window the message is plastered across the screen from where the cursor currently is.

I understand it may be Electron’s heritage, but it seems to be a fairly easy fix.

https://www.electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/updates

setInterval(() => {
  autoUpdater.checkForUpdates()
}, 60000

60000 in above example from Electron is 1 min (!), the default in the engine is 600000 == 10 minutes, something like once a day or even once a week would make much more sense, wouldn’t it?

This is not to mention other overheads (OS + network), not all of us are on the latest hardware.

Thank you.
Frederik.

2

We check for updates once per hour. I think that’s fair trade-off between resources vs how fast users get the update.

If you find the console output annoying (wait till you see the chromium renderer warnings) you can always hide the output with > /dev/null 2>&1

You can also disable auto-updates and manually check for updates from Settings > About.

3

Thank you for your reply, but…

  1. The check is about every 10 minutes. If you want a proof, let me know.
  2. this is Settings → About and I don’t see any way to disable check for updates. I thoroughly checked before posting if that option is available in settings. If it is a config file change, please point me out to it.
    Thank you.
    obsidian_about
    obsidian_about1313×780 25.7 KB
4

Please update your installer. It’s quite old, the option should be available under About then.

5

Thank you. That did it (remove/reinstall new).

Although that left me with some questions about what good is Electron update mechanism if I can not see new settings after autoupdate :slight_smile:

Excellent app. Thank you!

6

How does one do that?

7

Download the latest version from obsidian.md

1 Like
8

The two-layer update system exposed in this post was surprising to me too. It might be worth considering a truly full update system in a not so distant future.

I’m assuming “installer” is the binary and what currently gets auto updated are only the javascript and related “web” files, if that is correct the lack of automatic updates for the binary could easily cause more than just a repeat every 10-minute check like security issue for example. I’m not saying the binary needs to be updated on every version, but there should be some server control that can trigger binary updates when it detects binaries older than X.

As a proud annoying Mac user, this framework is the gold standard for updates: https://sparkle-project.org

9

Since this is in the graveyard, it will get lost. Please open a #feature-requests with this idea. Keep in mind there might be technical limitations from electron related to this for updating the binary or what works for all operating systems (e.g. Discord also sends you to their website for updates on occasion, at least on Linux).