New sync system

Jay

Thanks Eik ! I think the coffee shop wifi must have signed me out and the upload failed silently 🙁. I’ve confirmed and it’s up now.

Jorge

@Jay as the mobile app is completely unusable to me (it locks up every 5 minutes and it takes 3 minutes to restart) I’ve just given up on it. It’s completely improductive. But every time I see there is a beta update to it I try reinstalling it (because once I go to beta it doesn’t let me go back at it locks up). I haven’t been able to apply any of your mobile updates because every time I enabled the beta option the app just freezes in the loading documents.

I have a hater internet connection in my phone now (300 Mbps download) but it doesn’t make a difference it still status on the loadings documents prompt. The only way to go back to stable is reinstall it.

Jay

Jorge Where does it freeze when loading documents? Is it at the new document load loading screen? Or is it just blank? It’s very strange that the web app would be different than the mobile app - they do basically the same thing… Now that sync itself is generally more stable I will start to look more at performance. There should be a lot of room for improvement. From memory I think you’re on Android - is that right?

Is the beta web/desktop app working better for you now?

Jorge

I am trying to test the beta in the browser in the phone. That one can take the beta updates but it’s not completely usable in the phone. It suffers from the same Slow loading times, dragging the boards to reorder then is a pain in the wazoo, and worst of all is constantly shifting between offline and online., and eventually it collapses and forces a Refresh.

Jorge

Jay

I forgot to mention as well that in the browser version on Android, running on edge, editing text is extremely difficult because as soon as you touch an item and bring the keyboard up, the text is duplicated out of position making it impossible to read what you are typing.

e. g.

Also notice how in the mobile browser there still those weird links (internal id’s being displayed).

Where does the mobile app freeze? Upon starting the app the first thing it says it’s “Loading documents…”. If you kill it and restart it same thing, only way out of an uninstall and reinstall and to not activate beta.

Yes I am running on Android.

I haven’t tried the beta in desktop at all. I won’t risk it until the beta in browser is usable. I haven’t tried the beta in browser for the last week, I’ll give it a whirl for your last update on the next couple of days.

I am still relying on the stable on desktop, but my patience is growing thin with so many white screens of death per day, and I can’t use properly any of the solutions for mobile and that is a big deal for anyone not being able to use your organizer in your phone and being restricted only to your laptop.

If I remember correctly it has been since December that the beta is unusable for me in any way.

Jay

Jorge I think the latest beta update should work much better for you now, which would be more noticeable on mobile since phones are slower.

I have now copied your data to my test account where even though the text is all encrypted I can try to reproduce the slowness and sync problems you’re seeing. This update fixes a problem I found where migrating old boards got sync stuck into a loop which may be what was locking it up, and now it feels usable at least. I’m working on the speed of pane load/updates now, and will hopefully have an update to fix that tomorrow.

Eik

Eik Seems to be fixed in Update 1680316549722.

Jorge

Jay so tried again updating mobile app to beta with the exact same result. The stable version cannot be upgraded but is responsive. As soon as I click the update to beta button, the app restarts and gets locked up loading documents.
Even if you click to reload same thing just stuck forever. Only way out of an uninstall.

So I still can’t try out the beta in the mobile app. I’ll stick to trying the browser beta in the cell phone.

Jorge

Jay
Tried the beta again on edge in the android phone and this is what I get

Unfortunately none of the boards respond because the app remains unresponsive for a while in that screen and eventually white screens and restarts.

So beta is no good in the phone at all.
Not even the boards that I created in the beta version in the incognito browser in my laptop

Jay

Jorge Ok, thanks for the update! I’ve got an update almost ready to go that might fix this - it improves load time by 40% in my testing. I’ll keep testing on your (encrypted) data and try it on my Android phone.

The web version was never intended to be used on a phone so it’s definitely not a smooth experience, especially with text input. But some people prefer using it on tablets so I didn’t specifically disable it. It’s a good way to test whether sync is working at least 🙂.

Jay

I just released a new beta update which massively improves load time and pane update time, and uses much less memory. I believe this should fix your load issues Jorge. Running my test account with your (encrypted) data I reproduced the mobile app not loading and the mobile web app being very slow. In this update the mobile app loads fine and is actually quite snappy 😀. And mobile web, while the UI is tough to use on a phone, looks to be working well.

I also reproduced it ping ponging Offline and found it was trying to save the old boards data back onto itself and hitting the “Writes too large” error. Your boards’ old collapsed data is so large that it completely broke sync and threw it into an infinite loop of trying to sync which also made it incredibly slow. That’s actually deep in Firebase’s code so I can’t change that, but I can fix it trying to write too much data 😂. Beta now completely discards the old panes and collapsed data locally (but leaves it in the database for now so stable will keep working). And the way collapsed state saves is now many orders of magnitude more efficient so it won’t be able to grow too large to sync.

andrew

I am not caught up on all the posts on the sync issues, but I had been using stable on desktop for several weeks without a problem. I had noticed an issue where the Gmail inbox was sometimes stuck showing just one old message from November, so I decided to uninstall and then reinstall. Now most of my boards are blank in desktop stable as well as if I load beta in an incognito window.

What should we be using now if we want a stable experience (right now I don’t have time to deal with instability which is why I have been staying on stable)? I really don’t understand why stable is suffering effects of changes to the sync system if those sync changes are only in beta and I have been running stable on desktop and mobile only for a long time now.

Do I need to recreate these blank boards or is there a way to recover them?

Jay

andrew Can you try stable in a browser and see if the boards show up correctly? If not then it may have been a bug in an old beta version that screwed up the boards. Had you used an early beta version?

If you want a fully stable experience it may be safer to stick to stable, though for what it’s worth I’m doing all of my primary work on beta and I haven’t experienced any issues in a while, and I believe the beta is good to use now. There seem to still be some issues with migration of old data, but we will hopefully get those worked out soon. I’ve got a fix for performance problems coming shortly.

andrew

Jay Same boards are still empty in stable in an incognito browser window. The Mobile board is also empty and that synced to the mobile app, which now has no panes.

I had used beta for a while but switched over to stable a few weeks ago (after creating a new main document to which I copied contents of my original main doc before it disappeared) and it had been working fine.

Jay

andrew I’m looking at your boards data in the backend and I see some boards still there on the old format from stable so they should be ok. But some like Mobile were completely migrated to the new format. There was a bug in the beta version a while ago that was overwriting the old panes data so those are unfortunately cleared out. Though we have extensive backups for documents we unfortunately don’t for boards, so I don’t have a way to recover that. That is one of the future goals of the new sync system though - to be able to back up and restore boards and settings data too.

You could recreate the boards on stable and everything should be fine there, or at least as fine as it has always been. Stable is at least a known quantity since it hasn’t been updated since August and it has the bugs we all know about 😅. I think the latest version of the beta is in a better and more stable place than the “stable” version at this point. I personally am using it for my day-to-day and it’s been solid, and we’re still working on testing every edge case we can think of to find any holes.

And if you add a pane to the Mobile board on desktop it should fix mobile not loading any panes. I’m going to fix that in an upcoming beta, to make mobile handle the error state of having no panes.

Jorge

Jay
I tried to test the new beta in mobile, but my situation so stands as I described previously: the app doesn’t download the beta version so I am still stuck with stable in mobile.

Let me describe it again
Starting from scratch I delete the app from my phone. I reinstal it (seeing the same as @Jerud in the store I have to search for moo.do to find it, otherwise it’s pages and pushes of games).
At that point I am in stable

I open one of my password protected documents (not even the biggest, just my personal document).
I then go to About Legend to click on the beta button.
At that point the app asks me to restart audi I confirm.
App is now stuck trying to load again.

At that point after waiting several minutes, I restart it only to get stuck in the same place. Only way out is uninstall and go back to stable.
It seems to me that is trying to load my documents using the beta version that corresponds to June, but since that one is not the recent one it’s unable to load. I suspect it would first load with the old beta and then realize there is an update and download the new beta, but since it gets stuck ugh loading the document with the old version, it never gets to the point of being able to download the most recent beta.

I will try again without having any of my encrypted documents open. That would leave it icky with the tiniest of documents open. Se is that makes any difference
BTW Google signing continues to not work, I have to sign in with my alternate email.

Jorge

Jay
Sorry to say that even with no big documents open the situation is the same, as soon as I activate the beta it gets stuck loading documents, and this time only the tiniest of documents were open. I let it rip for 10 minutes or so and still stuck.

Unless you are able to download the app with the latest beta already activated, I don’t think it will let me try it.

andrew

Jay Yes, I had recreated some of the previously lost boards and those seem intact. The ones that I hadn’t previously lost are the ones that now are empty.

I just switched over to Beta and will recreate boards in that and try to stick with that on desktop and mobile. I noticed that the panes on one of the boards are set to show my original main document that I haven’t used in weeks since I copied all the contents to a new main doc. That original main doc was not in stable as of late but has now reappeared in beta. I am going to delete it to get rid of it once and for all (I exported it a while ago, copied the contents to my new main doc and haven’t modified it since).

christophe

@Jay once everything sync related is sorted out I think you’ll move the beta to stable.
Before you tackle the mobile app (from memory, I think that’s what you intended), I hope you’ll take the time to fix all the bugs that have been reported in the current stable release, because there are many.
I don’t want to speak for the others, but I’m sure that would be a request from everyone.
Please, make sure in the future to propose improvements on the beta version, and once it has been tested in all possible ways, move the beta version to stable before attacking a new process.
We’ve been struggling to use Legend for several months, I think many of us wondered about our future on this application.
I have the impression that only a few more weeks are missing before seeing the end of the tunnel!

Jay

Yes, I think it should be a few more weeks until a stable release. I feel good about where it is now, but we should give it time to make sure it’s very ready. And there’s still a few minor things that are missing in the beta version (like I haven’t updated the importers yet) that need to be there for a stable update.

I made a mistake of going heads down on this for months without communicating enough, so I can certainly understand your worries! And the stable users haven’t seen an update for a very long time, so it will be great to get this out.

In addition to the sync fixes, there’s been a lot of underlying infrastructure work which will enable moving very quickly on future fixes and features. So once this is ready we should be on a much faster release cycle than before.

And I will make sure to spend some time fixing small bugs before going deep into any other big projects.

andrew

andrew Well I created a new board with 4 panes (1 calendar, 2 outline, 1 email) in Windows desktop (now trying beta), closed the app and then reopened the app, to find that all 4 panes reverted to the default outline view of a different document (my Test document).

andrew

When I add a calendar pane, it is defaulting to my Test document but when I open the document selector panel, there are no documents shown, except 3 old ones in the Trash. Also even though the Test document is shown in the header of calendar pane, the calendar, whether in day, week or month view, shows no lines or contents, it’s just blank white, with the times or days along the edge, as the case may be.

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