Sync diagnostics

Overview

• Located in about:sync (or chrome://sync-internals)
• Tabs:
  • About: Concise status overview, also contains mini versions of "Data" and "Traffic Log"
  • Data: Dump debugging data to text for copy & paste
  • Sync Node Browser: Browse all synced data
  • Search: Search for strings in all synced data
  • User Events: Create test USER_EVENTS entities
  • Traffic Log: Log of all of the sent and received messages to and from Chrome sync servers
  • Invalidations: Inspect incoming sync invalidations per data type, i.e. messages from the server informing the client that new data is available.

About tab

• Contains all the most-used features and stats; most error states should show up here, and will be colored red
• Updates on the fly
  • Try moving a bookmark, or stopping and starting sync
• Contains "Dump status" (same as the "Data" tab), and a protocol log (same as the "Traffic Log" tab)

Data tab

• "Dump sync events to text" button: Dumps all info from the "About" tab, including the protocol log, to copy-pastable text
  • But can also select datatypes info to dump
• "Dump sync nodes to file" button: Dumps all the above, plus the actual synced data (basically the contents of the "Sync Node Browser" tab), to a file

Sync Node Browser tab

• Shows sync nodes aka entities
  • Sync nodes are structured in a tree, shown on the left, with details of the selected node on the right
  • Each data type has a top-level node which is a child of the root node
  • Only the bookmarks sub-tree has a true tree structure
    • Everything else is just a list under the top-level node
• Does not auto-update; you need click "Refresh"

Search tab

• Searches expressions in all the nodes
• Supports Regex over the JSONified version of each node
• Has quick searches to provide for easy access to interesting nodes
  • Unapplied updates
  • Unsynced items
  • Conflicted items (unapplied and unsynced)
  • Deleted items

User Events tab

• Allows creating test USER_EVENTS

Traffic Log tab

• Shows all messages (Commit and GetUpdates) sent between Chrome and the sync servers
• By default, does not capture the actual entity specifics; this can be enabled via the "Capture Specifics" checkbox in the "About" tab, or the --sync-include-specifics command-line param
• Logs all messages that happen while sync-internals is open, plus up to 6 (by default) messages that happened before; this can be configured via the --sync-protocol-log-buffer-size command-line param

Invalidations tab

• Show a log and running totals (since browser startup) of incoming invalidations per data type