SmugMug Android App Slowness Issues

wmstumme · March 15, 2016

I have the SMugMug Android app on both a smart phone and a tablet . I've noticed that the images from galleries that I have posted in the last couple weeks are very slow to load--to such a degree that it is really unusable on both devices. I thought that the reason the older galleries still load fine was due to some cacheing of the earlier items, but I cleared that cache and I'm still seeing a real difference between older and the very newer gallieries.

Any idea what is going on?

Thanks

Will

leftquark · March 16, 2016

Hi Will,
Would you mind providing some links to the older galleries and newer galleries so we can take a look?

Ferguson · March 16, 2016

Will, there are two modes that the android app works in, one is where it caches images to your phone, and then subsequent displays of those are made from the phone's memory not smugmug. They say something like "offline enabled".

Is your problem with those cached for offline view, or those coming down directly from Smugmug each time?

If, for example, you had older galleries cached, and newer are not, you could see what you are seeing.

If you, like me, came from the older Android app - it had very different features for offline cache loading. I find the new one a real pain in that regard, requires a lot of babysitting to make sure it gets the right galleries cached.

wmstumme · March 16, 2016

leftquark wrote: »

Hi Will,
Would you mind providing some links to the older galleries and newer galleries so we can take a look?

Here is an "older" gallery that seems to load fine -- from just a couple weeks ago.

http://www.willspix.com/Girls-Lacrosse/Catholic-Univeristy-of-America/CUA-2016/CUA-v-Salisbury-27-Feb-16

Here are a couple newer galleries that I just can t seem to get to load:

http://www.willspix.com/Girls-Lacrosse/Catholic-Univeristy-of-America/CUA-2016/CUA-vs-Rowan-9-Mar-16

http://www.willspix.com/Girls-Lacrosse/Catholic-Univeristy-of-America/CUA-2016/CUA-vs-Cortland-13-Mar-16

Ferguson:

I thought it was just a caching issue too, but even after clearing cache's, giving it some time to download, I can 't figure out how to get these to work cleanly. Even when I can get one or two photos to come up, trying to swipe to other photos leaves me with a blank screen. The older galleries, even ones I haven't looked at in a really long time, still seem to load and act fine.

Via the web browser on my laptop or desktop, everything still seems fine...

Ferguson · March 16, 2016

wmstumme wrote: »

Ferguson:

I thought it was just a caching issue too, but even after clearing cache's, giving it some time to download, I can 't figure out how to get these to work cleanly. Even when I can get one or two photos to come up, trying to swipe to other photos leaves me with a blank screen. The older galleries, even ones I haven't looked at in a really long time, still seem to load and act fine.

Via the web browser on my laptop or desktop, everything still seems fine...

There is a terminology issue here, and my apologies if this is all obvious, but in case not:

There are actually three places photos can appear in this app:

- Loaded dynamically when you asked for it from Smugmug

- In the cache

- In the offline store.

If you look at a gallery:

The little green arrow on the top says for that gallery images should be downloaded and saved locally for speed. The little white arrow on each image says that one has been downloaded.

That is "offline".

There's also a cache the program uses, and one way things go into the cache is to be saved as offline, you change it to not-offline - the copy goes into the cache.

If you look at the settings screen, the "offline content" is listed separately from "Clear cache". Clearing the cache does not remove offline content, it clears these temporary files that may be released but not (yet) returned to the android available disk space.

As best I can tell you cannot know if a file is in the cache or not (other than to clear it and assume it is gone). You should be able to tell if it is offline.

If it is marked with the little arrow to be offline, it should be available to display instantly, and more importantly without the network even working. If that is slow, the issue is on your android (might still be the Smugmug program of course).

If it is not marked with the little arrow, it needs to go to the network to download, either Wifi or cellular (depending on which options you set). If that's slow, it could be the network or the program of course.

One way to make sure is just put the phone in airplane mode and try to display the photos -- if they come up at all, they are offline (or cached), and if slow.

I find files that are marked offline are always immediately available to view. If it's dynamically loading from Smugmug all bets are off, as it may also be working to download stuff in the background, and sometimes it is fast, sometimes slow. I just put in a big SD card and download (almost) everything offline.

If you already knew all this please ignore this posting entirely....

leftquark · March 16, 2016

Hi Will,
I had a few of our QA folks test out your galleries and they all seemed to load the same speed: nice and fast. Have you tried using both WiFi and/or your regular data plan?

I'm going to pass this along to the Android team to see if they can provide me with some additional troubleshooting steps.

leftquark · March 16, 2016

If it's not an issue with your connection, you can try closing the app out of memory on your device by choosing: "device settings -> apps -> smugmug -> force stop" and seeing if that resolves it.

HaraldE · March 17, 2016

Ferguson wrote: »

If you already knew all this please ignore this posting entirely....

Hello Ferguson, no I didn't know all of this, maybe half of it, and I found your writing very interesting so thanks a lot

I very much wish the whole "download" scenario could be officially documented somewhere, maybe in a help page

Thanks a lot, Harald

wmstumme · March 20, 2016

leftquark wrote: »

If it's not an issue with your connection, you can try closing the app out of memory on your device by choosing: "device settings -> apps -> smugmug -> force stop" and seeing if that resolves it.

Well, finally had some time this weekend to try some things out. I have tried clearing the cache, the stored datat, forcing the app to stop, and even stopping and restarting the devices. I have both a Motorola phone and an LG tablet. The activity is consistent between the two. Trying to access any galleries from February 2016 and earlier--no problem. They display quickly and without issue. The four galleries I uploaded in March 2016 are very slow. The index page for each of the galleries seems to come up fine. But the photos come up slowly, if at all. Sometimes a low-res or pixellated version of the photo will come up for a few seconds, but then go away and just leave a black screen. Sometimes the photo just never seems to come up and I'm left with a blank, black screen.

I'm using version 3.0.4.20160202.

Just really seems strange--especially that it is only those new galleries.

Will

leftquark · March 23, 2016

Hi Will,
I'm going to ping one of our Android developers to take a peek and see if we can dig a little bit futher. Stay tuned.

SmugMug Android App Slowness Issues

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