Not sure if this is supposed to go under “add-ons” or “FSRS”.
I understand rescheduling all cards after optimizing FSRS parameters. However, sometimes I click the “reschedule all cards” button in FSRS Helper even though I haven’t changed the FSRS parameters in any way since the last reschedule, and yet it still reschedules a lot of the cards. Even when clicking the button, then waiting 10 minutes, then clicking it again, it can reschedule all of my cards despite nothing changing in those 10 minutes.
Why does that happen? Is that normal? Should I avoid using that add-on?
Totally normal and the add-on is working fine. (It’s actually a better way to do rescheduling than reschedule-on-change in your deck Options, because it doesn’t have any of the drawbacks.)
Rescheduling includes load balancing and fuzz factor, each of which has a certain amount of randomness.
I just discovered the built-in rescheduler and switched to it after posting this, what are the drawbacks? The settings documentation just mentions it increased the collection size, is that it?
Reschedule-on-change adds an entry to the review log of every active card in your collection. See also: Deck Options - Anki Manual .
[All of those revlogs need to be synced with your collection …]
Sure, the increase in server traffic is a good thing to consider. But your major concern should be that if you run that a lot, your collection might get so big you can’t sync it anymore at all. Are there limits on file sizes on AnkiWeb? - Anki FAQs
As an example – my average reps-per-day is about 80, which adds 80 revlog entries. But I have about 8000 active cards and reschedule-on-change adds a revlog entry to every active card, so that’s 8000 revlog entries. Running reschedule-on-change would add the equivalent of 100 days of review history to my database each time. It’s like a rapid-aging disease for your collection.
In order to use reschedule-on-change, you have to save a change in your FSRS Options. FSRS Helper rescheduling can be done independently.
If you want to undo reschedule-on-change, it will also undo anything else you changed in the same Save in Options. FSRS Helper rescheduling can be undone on its own.
Reschedule-on-change can only be done at the level of the Options preset. FSRS Helper rescheduling can be done on your collection, specific decks, or even specific cards you select in Browse.
There is an open proposal to update the built-in reschedule-on-change to behave more like FSRS Helper rescheduling: Improve "Reschedule cards on change" .
So can there be some benefit in rescheduling all cards occasionally even though parameters have not been changed? Ie might the new intervals be “better”?
I don’t see what benefit there would be. Did something I said above imply there was a benefit?
The main reason to reschedule is because something has changed – your parameters, your Desired Retention, your Anki/FSRS version – and you want to shift your cards to follow that new schedule right now, instead of each card waiting until the next time you study it.
Thanks for the reply. No, you didn’t imply there’d be any benefit. I was just thinking that if the cards are being rescheduled, it is being done to make some kind of improvement.
It happens because of the randomness, to balance your workload fuzz your card order – as I said in my first response. I suppose that’s a benefit overall, but it doesn’t mean that the rescheduled cards are necessarily scheduled “better” than they were before.
