We have a mobile app that works pretty well, but occasionally we'll get people that get frustrated with it because it's "not working".

When we look into this, it almost always inevitably ends up being because they were in a remote area with low service and the app couldn't load what it needed.

We try and tell them this, but they are adamant that it's just our app, which, it kind of it since we don't really handle low service failures.

How do you architect your mobile app to handle failed requests in low service areas?

Hi

Are there any optimization guides or performance help with the immich app for iOS and android? I have a iphone 15 and a galaxy s23 and in the app there is constant stuttering and freezing. On android it often pops up that the app is unresponsive and asks me if I want to wait or kill the app.

If I access the library web interface from a different computer than the one hosing immich the performance is perfect without issue, its only the apps.

- I am running the docker image of immich on my m1 mac mini.

- I have a library of approximately 74000 photos and videos.

The phones are connected with wifi to the same network as the mac mini.

I have tried turning on the "prefer remote images" setting but it seems not to make a difference.

I’ve had slower wifi speeds for months even after installing the Deco Mesh Wifi System. So I decided to open the app and chose the “Network Optimization” feature just to play with it, turns out I was notified I have significant interference and that they would optimize my network and that my connection may be spotty for a bit while they do so.

I went from 90-100mbps download and 60mbps upload to 322mbps download and 515mbps upload. Idk if it was truly the network optimization feature or maybe they did some kind of network reboot that got my system to how it should be working, regardless, the increase in speed is enormous. It wasn’t a fluke, I’ve tested from multiple different devices both yesterday and today. The speed is higher, and I can notice it when streaming content as well. No more pauses during shows/videos or anything like that, when it used to happen literally EVERY time (every 20 mins or so). I’ve been watching YouTube all day without seeing a buffering circle once.

Tldr at bottom for how to probably get better/more consistent ping

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I am an OTR Trucker but also a gamer with what I like to think of as a somewhat sophisticated rig in my rig. I play a lot of competitive games like Dota 2 and League of Legends as well as fighting games like Guilty Gear: Strive, Street Fighter 6, and Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising. (add me if you wanna play any fighters especially lmao)

Obviously, using cell towers for internet through T-Mobile isn’t ideal, but I’ve created a system that has tremendously improved my experience. I went from being able to play my favorite games at a hit or miss quality, to being able to play with no issues 95% of the time. I’m sure that this technique will help anyone who is mobile with their Home Internet like I am, but could also prove useful to those in fixed locations depending on a testable variable.

I’ve been meaning to write this for a while but I was lazy, so this guide is rough as I’m tracing back each and everything I did, but I will do my best. This is born out of the fact I couldn’t find a guide on how to do this from start to finish. Everything I found online felt like it described different parts but never the whole story. It’s likely there’s a better/more efficient way to do all this but here’s my take on it that I came up with:

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The problem (usually): Bufferbloat

You can test your connection’s bufferbloat here: https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat. A caveat is that this may change depending on how much traffic is currently on the network, like what time of day it currently is.

Bufferbloat is the primary culprit behind why you can have 300 mbps down but still have ping spikes. An AI overview that sounds mostly correct from what I remember:

Basically, T-Mobile Home Internet is optimized to maximize speed for things like downloading and streaming, which works well for those activities but not as much for gaming.

Put simply, when TMOHI tries to use all available bandwidth, it fills up the connection's buffers—temporary storage areas that hold data before sending it out. When these buffers get too full, new data (like game commands or video call audio) has to wait in line, causing delays. This leads to higher ping and lag, especially in online games and video calls.

Apparently and basically the implication here is that if you use 100% of your download speed, you may experience bufferbloat, but if you limit it to under 100% then you’ll resolve some of the bufferbloat, from my understanding.

So, we need to reduce bufferbloat because that is what’s causing the ping spikes. However, TMOHI doesn’t let you do this by default, you need a separate router capable of running the SQM plugin which is designed to manage this. Now, evidently you can get this plugin on different types/brands/models of routers, but I looked at a list and got one at Walmart and ran into a ton of issues and didn’t get anywhere so I gave up and bought a GL.iNet router specifically for this that was confirmed to work because they apparently published the SQM plugin in the first place?? Anyways my point is you may be able to accomplish installing SQM on different routers but good luck I couldn’t figure it out.

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The model router I got was the GL.iNet GL-MT6000 off Amazon. Once I had it, I connected an ethernet cable from the WAN port of the GL.iNet GL-MT6000 to a LAN port on the TMOHI box, connected another ethernet cable from a LAN port on the GL.iNet GL-MT6000 to my laptop, and went to http://192.168.8.1 which is the login of the GL.iNet router.

While logged into the admin panel, I set up the router as you would a new router, but in regards to our specific goal of reducing bufferbloat, I went to Applications > Plug-ins and per research on this website: https://forum.gl-inet.com/t/configuring-sqm-to-reduce-bufferbloat/14125 I searched for, downloaded, and installed luci-app-sqm and sqm-scripts.

https://preview.redd.it/gyy4u8hulxoe1.png?width=1371&format=png&auto=webp&s=7627059a4d30b7c6cfd5e9f0220e5b28515909fd

Now we need to go to advanced settings, which you can find under System > Advanced Settings or 192.168.8.1/cgi-bin/luci. Go to Network > SQM QoS. This is the page where you’ll set the relevant settings to reduce bufferbloat. Essentially, you can set limits to your upload and download speed, which will reduce your bufferbloat and give you better ping. These are my settings:

https://preview.redd.it/loh786npkxoe1.png?width=940&format=png&auto=webp&s=84c951cb47f8a7a4b6a1936825d958132a031295

The previous link mentioned the Interface name should be eth1 but I set all of mine to eth0 and it works so idk. Possibly refer to the previous link from gl-inet.com.

Essentially these are 3 presets, because remember that all you *need* to do is make sure you’re not using 100% of the download speed that you can, 90% is fine. (I think…) So I switch between these 3 on an as needed basis, because one huge dynamic to this is that you are limiting your download speed, essentially trading speed for ping. Switching between these 3 presets, I can try to irk out as much speed as I can while also getting good ping. Obviously you can adjust these to fit your needs, I imagine someone stationary might really want to fine-tune this.

Speed test with SQM off:

https://reddit.com/link/1jc7afx/video/h1vg3jiykxoe1/player

Speed test with SQM on:

https://i.redd.it/riloq9w1lxoe1.gif

Obviously, I lost a ton of download speed, but in this case enough to comfortably stream videos and browse the web as I alt-tab from whatever game I’m in. If the internet is super awful I may try another preset, essentially in desperation as now I won’t be able to stream comfortably but as a trucker I’m happy if it just gets me good ping.

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Possibly unnecessary but additional steps I took, recommend doing them all tbh but w/e:

I also installed luci-app-qos and qos-scripts because QoS was often mentioned alongside sqm, but I’m not sure they’re necessary, but I’m just leaving the fact I did for record’s sake. From my understanding QoS is more relevant for households with multiple devices that want to prioritize a certain type of traffic within the household? Unsure if relevant to me, but maybe this could be a golden ticket I’m unaware of. Someone smarter than me may know.

I also disabled Network Acceleration under Network > Network Acceleration. For whatever reason when I had everything set up later on, it didn’t work, but disabling this caused everything to start working.While I was troubleshooting, in Advanced Settings, I added this text to System > Startup > Local Startup:

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# Put your custom commands here that should be executed once

# the system init finished. By default this file does nothing.

. /lib/functions/gl_util.sh

remount_ubifs

/etc/init.d/sqm restart

exit 0

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Apparently a problem that can happen is a cache doesn’t get cleared and the plugin won’t activate, and apparently this startup script is supposed to fix that issue? Anyways, posting it for record’s sake.

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Hilariously, another benefit this has is the side-effect of ‘spoofing’ your internet as wired internet, which is relevant because it’s trending in some fighting games to detect if someone is on wi-fi instead of wired internet, and then sort them out of your matchmaking. By connecting an ethernet cable from my laptop to the router, I am tricking my computer into thinking I’m wired even though my internet is ultimately coming from T-Mobile cell towers while I’m in a Semi-truck. Lmao.

Though, I guess technically this means that you can connect from your new router to your system wirelessly and this would all work in theory, but I enjoy not being filtered in Street Fighter 6, especially when my internet is usually actually super good.

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TLDR:

- Connect a SQM compatible (GL.iNet are usually compatible) router to your TMOHI box, and connect your system to your new router.

- Enable SQM on the router, probably by installing luci-app-sqm and sqm-scripts (possibly turn Network Acceleration off)

- Create at least 1 preset of SQM settings where you essentially throttle your download/upload speed while selecting either interface eth1 or eth0.

- profit?

Hi Everyone,

I have a HomeyScript in Homey that pings (fetch really) Google every 1 minutes:

const response = await fetch("https://www.google.com", {
      mode: 'no-cors'

This is my crude way of trying to get a sense of my "Internet-health". Once an hour I get the sum or errors that last hour, X errors (out of 60 tries). I have a dashboard with this parameter and I follow it.

In the beginning I thought that a bad value mostly had to do with Homey's bad Wifi. Any hows, I went on vacation out of home for a few days, and Voila - the error rate was really diminished.

Ping Errors - Away and then Home again

What could be the reason to the low errors when I'm away and the spikes when I get home again? Devices that was away and then reintroduced was; 1 iPad, 3 iPhones and 2 Apple Watches. 2 Laptops were shut down during that period as well.

Many thanks!

Edit (added the error message when ping fails):

Google is not reachable FetchError: request to https://www.google.com/ failed, reason: connect EHOSTUNREACH 142.250.74.164:443
    at ClientRequest.<anonymous> (/node_modules/node-fetch/lib/index.js:1501:11)
    at ClientRequest.emit (node:events:526:28)
    at TLSSocket.socketErrorListener (node:_http_client:442:9)
    at TLSSocket.emit (node:events:526:28)
    at emitErrorNT (node:internal/streams/destroy:157:8)
    at emitErrorCloseNT (node:internal/streams/destroy:122:3)
    at processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:83:21) {
  type: 'system',
  errno: 'EHOSTUNREACH',
  code: 'EHOSTUNREACH'
}

Ping failed, new NumberOfErrorsToday = 8

I tried real command prompt ping to that IP and it did not fail for 5 tries so maybe Homey does this more error-prone?

Usually

​

I don't know what to do about delivery optimization. It destroys our speed for over an hour sometimes. I've disabled it in services, I've disabled it in regedit, Ive tweaked its settings to allow it the absolute smallest amount of data possible- and it takes all it wants anyway. We only have 1.2 speed and it takes 7Mbs of that, sometimes more. Even youtube won't load, let alone work.

So i finally got round to sending some screen recordings to support, documenting the slow performance I regularly experience in the Android app. Here are some numbers for that in a single session, connected to a US-based VPN run by a large organization stateside (as advised by support, since I am located far from the US):

- 6 seconds to display a 20KB pdf attachment
- 2+ seconds to display an email in the app
- 5 seconds to display an 18KB png attachment
- 2+ seconds to display thumbnails from multiple attachments in the same email
- 4 seconds to download a 19KB docx attachment

These are not great numbers and for a direct comparison I forwarded the email from the first bullet to a Fastmail account and used their app to open the exact same attachment under the same conditions within a few minutes of timing it in Hey. It took under 2 seconds.

I've already sunk a lot of time into this so am not keen to do a much more controlled experiments but ~3x snappier performance in Fastmail does seem consistent with what people leaving Hey for Fastmail tend to talk about on this sub and the Fastmail one afaik.

Also tbc after quite a bit of back and forth with support, they admitted that what I am experiencing is expected behaviour given network conditions, namely, a consequence of Hey's backend design which does not apparently affect Fastmail's performance.

This is disappointing, of course, as I'm quite enthusiastic about other aspects of the service, I use it all the time as my primary means of external communication with multiple addresses across a couple of large institutions, and find many of the features (not all of them but many) quite clever and well-made. I also appreciate the company's focus on privacy etc and I prefer supporting small-medium software companies rather than the giant Apple/Google/Microsoft oligarchs.

I'm not sure at this stage if I will continue using Hey. Performance issues like these, which affect users most who are physically far from wherever in the states Hey servers are located, seem to be an outcome of Hey not relying on common content delivery networks like most apps do. If Hey put some servers closer to me, perhaps the app would be snappier — although given the number of people complaining about performance issues, it seems unlikely that distance to servers is the only issue here.

Performance can in principle be improved, though, so maybe if I wait and see a bit, I'll be pleasantly surprised....?