News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

July 14, 2008

internet

Crank down MobileMe’s 15 minute sync time

Posted Jul. 14, ’08, 9:47 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Internet

MobileMeAs one of our commenters noted, the Mac side of MobileMe doesn’t exactly live up to its instantaneous performance on the iPhone. Even if you set MobileMe to sync “Automatically”, the most your Mac will update will be every 15 minutes, which is hardly enough to sate us true cutting-edge infophiles.

Fortunately, it appears that you can tweak that setting if you don’t mind venturing into the dark realms of .plist editing. If you navigate to ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/ you’ll find a file called com.apple.DotMacSync.[your MAC address].plist. Pop that sucker open in your favorite plist editor and you change the AutoSyncInterval key’s value to the number of minutes you want for your sync (as usual, we recommend making a backup of this file before you do any alterations, just to be safe). Changing it to one minute or five minutes appears to produce the desired result though, of course, your mileage may vary.

Give it a try and let us known if it works for you. Maybe Apple will address this in a future update—then again, maybe. As U2 once put it, she moves in mysterious ways…


5 Comments

nematodirus said:

Sorry, doesn't seem to work.

Checking dotmacsync.log in Console shows Sync happening every 15 minutes regardless of the setting in the plist file (or maybe I'm doing something wrong ?)

July 14, 2008 12:46 PM
TinyElvis said:

It does not lie though, those that use PUSH will be automatic. It is the other options that sync on a schedule. Why would someone need to have dock preferences sync every minute.

July 14, 2008 1:39 PM
Anonymous said:

I have no ByHost directory nor anything in it yet I've setup my MobileMe account and it's working.

July 14, 2008 2:17 PM
Anonymous said:

anyone who needs to sync every minute is too important and should be terminated immediately!!!

July 14, 2008 5:16 PM
Anonymous said:

Use this setting at your system's peril. If you sync every minute, you're firing up about 5 processes - every single minute - which will load down your computer and network performance, not to mention putting additional strain on apple's servers. A really dumb idea.

If you MUST get something you just added / changed (a new Contact) immediately pushed , just sync the darned computer. Duh.


July 15, 2008 8:33 AM

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