SkyDrive Sync Engine Host

I had an issue with the sync engine host since I upgraded to 8.1 in October.  There is a pinned help article here

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/forum/sdfiles-sdsync/how-do-i-troubleshoot-uploading-downloading-and/8569cc0b-4d23-4db0-b9e9-98fe12785e5a

With Step 7 you can submit a ticket to support.

It took a few weeks for me to hear something and it was only after I contacted @MicrosoftHelps via twitter that I received a call.

The support person confirmed problems with skydrive in 8.1 and said the issues aren't consistent from machine to machine.

He remoted into my machine and ran the skydrive troubleshooter here

http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9835054

I ran this thing at least 10 times a day to no avail.

He then ran an advanced skydrive troubleshooter, that he said was unavailable for distribution

We waited a few minutes and it is now working.

An overall frustrating experience.

didn't know about this, if this delet's skydrive from my laptop i will be a happy man, microsoft should offer skydrive as an optional update for windows users

I don't know if this is helpful for troubleshooting or not, but...

I just edited a text file in my SkyDrive folder in Windows 8.1.  Then, remembering I am having issues and have to constantly stop the process, I edited it in the browser as well.

Right now, I have two copies of the file in my local folder, one with my machine's name appended to it.  (Makes sense, two separate edits, make two copies instead of having one potentially clobber the other.)  One copy has the sync arrows over it, the SkyDrive Sync Engine Host is chewing on my CPU again, and the system tray icon, when I mouse over it, says "Syncing 0.8KB out of 1.6KB".  (It's a small text file, about 800 bytes.)  If I look at the same folder on the web, I see both files there as well.

Maybe it just hit its CPU-chewing loop after it was done syncing and failed to update the system tray icon and the icons in the folder.  Don't know; it just appears to be somewhat doing what it's supposed to do, before dying.

Has anyone noticed that the Search Indexer is sometimes sucking big CPU, too?  I ask because between the Skydrive Host and the search indexer my CPU gets pretty locked at 99% no matter what else may or may not be running.

Ending Skydrive host also seems to release the Search Indexer.

I am only on a core 2 6600 with 8gb ram and a 250gb SSD but I have been battling the search indexer problem for many months but it has only been since I spotted the Skydrive activity that I have seen a way to consistently unlock the search indexer without just ending it.

I do use OneNote 2010 and have some of my notebooks on the skydrive and I have noticed that some older notebooks always have sync errors but I have never gotten around to figuring out what to do about it.   From the suggestions I have seen about the Skydrive sync issues, I am now wondering whether some of these high CPU problems may be due to sync issue stemming from OneNote and possibly other MS products that are integrated into Skydrive background access. I can certainly see how having to keep Excel spreadsheets synced to my SkyDrive or other office content could be the underground connection.

As for the "syncing" blue circle on the cloud, my status is always saying "synced 1 second ago" when it is happening. Once this stops, the cpu usage falls back to normal.... for awhile.

I haven't seen issues with Search Indexer, though the Anti-Malware Executable thing does seem to spike up at the most inopportune times.  (Downloading the latest Windows Updates, actually, when I turned off real-time scanning in Windows Defender, a process it was telling me would take hours to complete suddenly finished in a couple minutes.)  But this is usually after I've already terminated the SkyDrive Sync Engine process, so it's probably unrelated.

I have two Windows 8.1 devices that sync with my SkyDrive account. (Side note: I wonder when they'll update this to say "OneDrive" instead?)  One is an Asus laptop, and one is a Surface 1 RT tablet.  I never have issues on my tablet.  I use OneNote on my tablet constantly, and very rarely on my laptop.  I do use Word 2013 on my laptop often (and less frequently on my tablet) to edit documents on SkyDrive; but the documents I edit aren't actually in my account, but shared from another account. 

Since my tablet is an RT, the executable is likely different (compiled for ARM instead of x86), and I realize the comparison isn't an entirely fair test.