New sync system

Jorge

Jorge @Jay Update… it has now been several times that in the desktop app a board I was working on just disappears as the name, and a new ghost “Board” is created. I have consistently found that instead of messing with that ghost board, by just rebooting the desktop app a couple of times the board is properly brought back both in name and content.
REbooting only once doesnt do it. In many occassions it brings back the board name but not the board content completely. The second reboot brings back the full content of the board.

I dont know if it is just a matter of timing in the syncing, but my impatience leads me to just reboot a second time to get the problem solved.

Jorge

@Jay I am getting more stuff appearing in my personal document that comes from my work document!!
Many items have appeared out of the blue just below my first top level entry [ Inbox ] . A lot had appeared a couple of weeks ago, and today I got more items that clearly come from my work document.

Jorge

Changes in the browser version in a pane are not being brought back to the desktop app in a timely basis.
I opened a third pane in the desktop app. Because of the issue described above, I rebooted the desktop app but continued working on the browser app in another machine. Once I had finished doing everything I closed the third pane in the browser app, but that is never being updated in the desktop app. The desktop app shows 3 panes open in that board, while the browser app shows only 2 (because I had closed one).

Jorge

@Jay I am abandoning the use of the desktop app for now… this is the 5th time in the day that board disappears from the desktop app. Ithink I will stick to the browser version until this is fixed. now my [Process Inbox] boards have disappeared from both my Job and Personal groups of boards.

Jorge

@Jay I switched to my browser and my [Process Inbox] in my Job group is there, but not in my Personal group!!!
Not only that bu now the Mobile board disappeared from the browser version and can only be found in the desktop app!!!!

Also a board I had deleted in the desktop app is now back in the browser version!!!

Now I am getting REAL NERVOUS with board consistency!!!! Please help We cannot go back to the board instability we had before.

Jorge

@Jay I think this had been reported before, but in one of the most recent updates the filter and collapse functions just cease working after a while (both for the browser version and the mobile app). They start working again after recycling the application but end up not working again after a while.

Jay

Sorry for my absence this week! I just had a surgery to get my deviated septum fixed and recovery took a lot longer than expected! I am looking into these issues now.

Jay

I think the latest update should fix all of the bugs reported since the previous update.

I’ve never been able to reproduce the boards disappearing and ghost boards, but I fixed my best theory of what could cause that. If you continue to see it, do you see a pattern in what causes it? And are you mixing stable and beta or are you on beta on all devices?

Jorge

I am on beta on all devices now except Mailbird which continues to be on stable. If there was a way to şet Mailbird to beta I would change it in a snap.

Jay

Ok gotcha. I’ll do some testing of stable and beta running at the same time. I had thought I’d fixed it so their boards should be totally separate now… But I’ll check again. Let me know if the boards issues keep happening now.

Jorge

@Jay Yeah i keep losing boards. I thought it was only restricted to the windows app, but no… Ive been using only the browser version and I lost another time my “Process Inbox” board. A brand new ghost board appears pointing to my default document with only one pane. :-(

And again if I want to log off it tells me that there are item spending to be synched, however the status shows online

Interestingly this time I didn’t care about losing unsynched information and just logged off. When I logged back in, the board was back there in place.

Jay

Thanks Jorge!

From the error reporter it looks like you’re still hitting the same old “Write too large” error that’s been plaguing us for all this time, because your boards are so large that the save is larger than 16MB. And when that happens, Firebase (the Google Cloud database we use) freezes, stopping any further syncing and becoming super slow. It doesn’t throw an error, it just hangs, which is very annoying and means we need to preemptively constrain the save size to make sure it doesn’t go over the limit. The underlying bug in Firebase has been unsolved for years: https://github.com/firebase/firebase-js-sdk/issues/1158

I’ve tried a few different solutions to constrain the save size in recent updates already, but it seems like there’s some cases that I didn’t quite solve. I’ve finally got a new solution that should work for every case, but since it’s late at night now I’ll hold off on the update until I can test it more tomorrow.

I think (hope) that’s what’s causing the ghost boards too, because after it hangs things get really weird… But in case it’s not I’ll keep trying to reproduce that.

Also, the next update will include better logic for the “Online” status, to show “Saving” when there are outstanding unsaved changes.

Jorge

Thanks Jay… so when you say boards are too big what is the driver? Number of Panes? Number of items that the filter is bring up? Is there any practical limit that we should watch for?

Jay

The size of boards is mainly in panes’ collapsed state. It saves the collapsed state for each view a pane has been on, so that if you collapse a bunch of stuff in an Outline view, then switch to Agenda and back, it’s still as you left it.

But they actually shouldn’t be able to get that big anymore. The logic was originally quite naive, just saving the id of every item that had been manually collapsed or uncollapsed. Then mirrors made that more complicated, because an item could be in a pane multiple times through different hierarchies, so the unique ids got bigger. In the past few months I’ve been progressively making that better - reducing the length of the ids, improving the algorithm so collapse all sets a base state instead of modifying every item, making more targeted updates, etc…

But panes created before those fixes would still have the old large collapse state, and cloning old panes copies its old large collapsed state. So if you wanted to optimize you could close and recreate some panes you modify often, or just toggle collapse all (that resets all item collapse state and sets a base state).

Jay

@Jorge I just released the update which I think should fix those errors for you. And the online status now shows “Saving” while it’s saving, so you should see that turn from “Online” to “Saving” and then back to “Online” after some time, and then you should be all good.

Let me know if that seems to work better for you?

Jorge

Jay Sure I will try it out. Something that might be related that we have reported before is the fact that after you collapse all, and start opening level by level, there are sub branches that just didnt collapse. So when you click the collapse button everything collapses, but ifyou open a single branch then it doesn’t open by levels, meaning the next sub level is not collapsed but keeps its open state and therefore opens the whole branch completely.

I don’t know if its’related but from what you said, sounds that is functionality that is related.

Jorge

Jorge Well tried out the collapse all and in some panes the collapse all is jus tnot working. Some branches collapse others do not.

Jay

@Jorge Ok I’ll take a look at that collapse problem. Thanks for the info about that. It sounds like it might be a flaw in the logic of the change to collapse all.

Let me know how sync goes after this change? I’m hoping that it should fix all of the sync and board problems you’ve been seeing.

Jorge

@Jay I will.. Also please when you get a chance take a look at why the List view is not being preserved in panes. For some reason if you select a pane to be a list view it works, but when you change to another board and then come back to that board, the list view has changed to outline view.

it’s not a showstopper, but it’s very annoying to have to remember to change them back to list.

Jorge

@Jay Today I fired up the desktop app and let it stand there for a whil to sync up (as I hadntbeen using the last few days because of the previous bugs). Once it was synced I checked and there were a few items on a pane that is supposed to show me only my Today items (Outline View, AGenda Mode, Agenda Mode All) and I saw that items I had checked as complete in my browser window were not complete in my desktop app. Both desktop and browser are running your latest beta update.

I tried all kinds of combinations in the browser (uncheck, recheck etc…) to get them to sync back in the desktop. Some were synced immediately others simply refused to be synced and stayed as incomplete in my desktop app. I tried to refresh with the menu, restart the desktop app and still they were not synching. AFter trying to mark some complete in the desktop I noticed some refused to be marked as complete. Tried to uncomplete and complete a couple more times and then the whole board kind of went blank and name was again reset to “Board” as so:

After restarting the app the typical ghost board scenario…. boar is empty, no panes and just opening my default non-encrypted document in a single pane.

Will try to logoff and see if it resets.

As an aside, Ive noticed that my Legend\Partitions folder keeps growing steadily. After logging off, which folders if I delete them would be re-built from scratch to eliminate any possible corruption when I log back in??

AFter logging off and logging back on, boards are back in place and panes are correct. However the items that were not being marked as complete in desktop continue being incomplete while they are completed in the browser. Same thing continues to happen some items I mark as complete in the browser, get synced immediately in the desktop but some items remain unsynced.

Ive seen that the items that are failing to update are the google calendar items and not Legend internal items. I checked in settings and the sync is set correclty for those google calendars.

I then proceeded to open up the _legelnd_Boards.json to see the sizes you were talking about and discovered a board that was humongous compared to the the others. I tried the collapse all comand on that board in the desktop app and immediately the board I was sitting on in the browser (which was a different for) went blank in the exact same way desribed above. So issue is not exclusive to the desktop app and indeed is being triggerred by manipulation of these humongou sboards.

Interestingly this is a board (Visit to GT) that used to be have 3 panes and had recently reduced to 1 pane because I was almost done with it and about to delete it. But seeing the size I will continue experimenting on why is the size so big if the board has only one pane which is pointing to a branch that only has 358 items of which all are complete except for 32, and yet the board file reflects 81,158 lines in the json file.

Digging deeper I found that the most number of lines is in the DefaultPanes branch (which I suspect holds the saved default definition of the board), which makes sense because I had saved it when it was big.

With that discovery I started looking for more boards that had those DefaultPanes branches too big and discovered others that had been given me trouble. Such as my Process Inbox board which indeed has a lot of panes I need, but the DefaultPanes contained many times more items than the Panes branch, so i went back and Saved the default Board again, and that got rid of the huge number of lines.

So I am going to go through all my big boards and collapse all in the big panes and then save the default board in an attempt to make sure that the default defintiions have taken the latest shape of the panes without the inefficient storage the previous version so fthe app were using.

Sorry it took me to really need to th ejson structure of the boards to really understand your point on the size of the boards, but more importantly how to fix it. However, this is not task for th e aint of heart of normal users.

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