[Bug] Downloads freeze and do not start

[mrsilva]

Describe the bug

When downloading files from a Telegram group, most of the times (about 90%), it will display the message "All files will be downloaded to directory" but it will not start downloading anything for hours. I have to cancel it manually, then restart manually.

Command:
tdl dl --continue --delay 0s --limit 2 --threads 1 --skip-same -e jpg,jpeg,png,gif,htm,avi,mkv,mp4,pdf,xlsx,webp,mp3,tgs -f json-file -d directory

Whenever this happens tdl should detect nothing has happened and abort instead of being frozen doing nothing for hours?

Running the following commands will ALWAYS work:

• tdl chat ls
• tdl chat export -c https://t.me/group -o file

I have Telegram Premium.

Thanks

Mike

To Reproduce

tdl dl --continue --delay 0s --limit 2 --threads 1 --skip-same -e jpg,jpeg,png,gif,htm,avi,mkv,mp4,pdf,xlsx,webp,mp3,tgs -f json-file -d directory

Expected behavior

Should start downloading

Version

Version: 0.20.1
Commit: 742da1b
Date: 2025-12-14T16:19:18Z

go1.23.10 windows/amd64

Which OS are you running tdl on?

Windows

Additional context

No response

[mrsilva]

Apparently when I remove the exclusions, the download has a much higher probability to start normally. Will test this further and report back.

Update what happened was it started downloading, but downloaded the excluded small files, the files I'm interested in are all around: 1GB

[mrsilva]

I deleted the log file, ran the tdl command, it did not start any downloads, it was "frozen", after 10 minutes i pressed control-C

Attached is the debug log for those 10 minutes

latest.log

[mrsilva]

I suggest a feature to add a timeout, if the client is doing nothing for X minutes, then abort. This way the client wouldn't be frozen doing nothing for hours

[mrsilva]

Installed WSL under Windows, as someone mentioned that tdl works better in Linux than Windows, but same issue occurs.

It shows "All files will be downloaded to '/mnt/y/directory' and freezes, nothing happens for a long time

[mrsilva]

I believe I found the root cause for the freezes. When I started using tdl I downloaded to a local USB drive and it worked. I then changed my scripts to download to a NAS network drive and that's when it did not work, it simply froze. I then decided to move back to the local USB hard drive and it started working again.

Is it possible that tdl does not work with Windows network drives?

[mrsilva]

Its not the network drives... it worked a few times on a local USB hard drive, but then stopped working again.

Maybe its the number of files in the channels and the --skip-same option?

When I started saving in the USB drive, the destination folders were empty and it worked well. After I had 23,000 files locally, and after stopping and trying to restart tdl, it didn't work. I tried 10 times in a row, waiting 60 seconds to see if anything happened, but never worked. Immediately after I removed the --skip-same option, it started working again. I stopped it and restarted it several times and it always worked.

The channels I'm trying to download have over 100,000 files in them.

Could the issue be the logic behind the --skip-same option? Could tdl freeze because it cannot manage the sync between so many files? There are still 80K files to download and I already have 20K locally

[mrsilva]

I started using the following workaround to download files in channels with many files.

I download yearly JSONs for each channel, download each year and each channel separately. After I finish a year I start with a new empty folder for the next year, and so on. With this workaround tdl has not frozen at all