Nextcloud Client takes a while to start

I’ve had a Nextcloud instance for about a year now and I was always wondering why the Nextcloud client on my workstation starts up so slowly, while it doesn’t even take a second on my laptop.

As it turns out, the problem was my local folder synchronisation setting. On my workstation the whole Documents folder is selected to sync, but only a few subfolders actually have synchronisation activated. On my laptop, each folder has it’s own synchronisation entry in the settings.
After using strace(1) to figure out what the problem might be, it was apparent that the client was scanning folders that aren’t even selected for synchronisation. In addition, it looks like it struggles a lot with small files, and having a bunch of git repositories in there didn’t really help.

Removing the large amount of small files was enough to make it faster, but it’s clear that the ideal way to solve this is to set up a connection for each folder separately, which is what I’ll do in the future.