Updated July 2026 · 6 min read
Update profiles automatically or manually
A subscription is either refreshed by hand or pulled on a timer. This covers where both live, how to tell a refresh really happened, and what quietly changes underneath once it does.
What a manual refresh actually does
Right-click a profile card and choose update: the client fetches the subscription address again, replaces the whole config file and asks the core to reload it. Nothing is merged, so anything that lived only in the old file is gone.
The update request travels over the network like anything else. With the proxy switched on it goes out through the proxy, which helps when the provider is blocked locally but means a broken proxy path takes the update down with it.
Choosing a sensible update interval
The interval sits in the edit-info dialog on the card context menu, is measured in minutes, and belongs to each subscription separately. A list that barely changes is fine on a full day; one that gains and loses nodes often can be shorter.
Do not set a few minutes. Beyond wasting quota, frequent pulls can look like abuse and earn you a rate limit, which defeats the point. With several subscriptions, stagger the intervals so they do not all fire the moment the machine wakes up.
Automatic updates only run while the client is running. Hours spent shut down are not made up afterwards, so a manual refresh is still needed if you want fresh nodes right after boot.
Telling whether it really updated
Do not trust the toast alone. Check that the update time on the card jumped to just now, and that remaining traffic and the expiry date moved as well — if none of the three changed, no new file arrived.
If the timestamp moved but the nodes look identical, the provider probably published nothing new. Clicking update again will not change that, and a look at the provider panel answers it faster.
Failures and side effects
Separate an expired subscription from a dead network first. An expired one usually still answers, only with empty content or zero traffic left, while a network problem times out or resets and returns nothing at all. Retrying on another connection tells the two apart.
Success has a cost too. The profile file you edited by hand is replaced wholesale, so keep changes in a Merge or Script extension instead. And if the provider renamed its nodes, the one you had selected in a group disappears and has to be chosen again.
What is the project?
Clash Verge Rev is a Tauri-based GUI for Mihomo with profile management, system proxy, TUN mode, rule editing and WebDAV backups.