Don't trust default timeouts

Re:Don't trust default timeouts by acdha on Saturday August 29, 2020 @09:57AM (#24316125)

This is a surprising blind spot for most large tech companies. I’m sure Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. spend a lot of money on their corporate networks but you’d think they have at least one engineer who encounters unreliable wireless on a regular basis. Only Netflix and appears to test for this - I’ve never had to toggle networking to restore functionality after a dropped packet.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Don't trust default timeouts by throwaway2048 on Saturday August 29, 2020 @10:15AM (#24316251)

Youtube also handles it pretty well, but the twitch player for example, gives up forever if the network is too flakey, who exactly wants that behavior?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Don't trust default timeouts by powersnail on Saturday August 29, 2020 @06:43PM (#24319935)

Youtube Music, however, has the opposite problem. It always tries to load the online version, regardless of whether I have downloaded the file already. Even if I specifically clicked a file in the downloaded list, it will still try the online version when the next song begins.

When I have flaky connections, I get so many pauses (of songs I have downloaded) that I just deleted the app alltogether.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Don't trust default timeouts by valuearb on Saturday August 29, 2020 @04:09PM (#24319054)

With mobile operating systems like iOS one problem you frequently encounter is the user moving from one physical connection layer to another, ie WiFi to Cellular and back. iOS will send requests on both, but won’t move your existing request from one to another.

So for one app I write the user (say a company executive who always complained his photo uploads failed but was too busy to give a detailed bug report or even a specific time it happened) would take pictures at home or office, which starts uploads on WiFi, then put the phone in their pocket and get into their car and drive away. So I ended up using relatively short timeouts (30 seconds) and automated retries.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Don't trust default timeouts by GuB-42 on Saturday August 29, 2020 @12:23PM (#24317200)

Facebook has a pretty advanced tool for testing bad internet connections.

https://github.com/facebookarchive/augmented-traffic-control

Google, Apple and Microsoft also have ways to simulate bad connections but Facebook seems to be the best at it. I heard they even encourage their employees to switch to 2G from time to time.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Don't trust default timeouts by acdha on Saturday August 29, 2020 @01:18PM (#24317668)

Oh, I know they have people who know this is a problem but every time that I spend time somewhere with an unreliable connection I encounter problems in apps and websites made by those companies. That’s the difference between knowing it’s a concern in theory and making it a regular part of your testing.

This is especially noticeable in their web apps because they rarely reimplement the functionality which is built in to the browser. When I’m on the subway, mbasic.facebook.com has things like a working reload but the app and Facebook.com will both fail to do elementary error handling and will often discard whatever you entered.

[ Parent | on HN ]