New sync system

SamMarrocco

I’ve also seen the iOS/iPhone app ‘stuck’ on “SAVING” at the bottom of the screen from time to time. Restarting the app fixes that. I’ll keep watching for this, but even after restarting the synched order of items is still incorrect on the Mobile board.

I have very reliable, fast connections on all my machines, so it isn’t a networking issue.

SamMarrocco

I just started Legend native on my Mac laptop, and now I have several old boards that were deleted several days ago, and several default boards were also added (Tasks, Today, Main Board, Management Board).

I checked my iPhone, and it was stuck on “SAVING” again, so I restarted it. The newly added old boards are NOT visible on my iPhone, and are NOT visible on the web version of Legend, but ARE visible on the MacOS version.

SamMarrocco

Jay

After ignoring all the ‘bonus boards’ that stayed up on my MacOS version all day, I worked in the Windows version and my iPhone, changing major portions of a document.

Tonight I checked my iPhone version: The Legend app was again stuck on “SAVING”. So was my iPAD version, but they showed my document contents.

I went to my Windows Legend Native and a huge portion of what I had done today was gone.

So I went into the iPhone and iPAD, force quit them both and restarted them. Now the iPhone and iPAD both showed that huge portion of today’s work as missing.

AAAAARRRRGGGGGGHHHHH. I’ve been trying to get through a single day without missing boards, re-appearing old boards, out of order items not syncing, iPhone and iPad apps freezing and needing to be restarted, documents not synching, items disappearing and coming back to an app and seeing empty lines or previously highlighted items no longer highlighted or missing their children. Each day and update I think something has been fixed but something else pops up…..and these are all fundamental issues involving the synching.

At this point I’m spending more time repairing issues and troubleshooting the app than actually working with it, and this is a single, relatively small document. I was able to restore my document to it’s former state by using the backups but my frustration with its reliability is obvious.

Jay

SamMarrocco I’ve been trying to reproduce this with a copy of your data on my test account to try to reproduce exactly what you’re seeing, but I can’t find any issues. I see errors in our error reporter from your account that boards are still in the old format, but all your boards have been migrated to the new format. So based on that and what you said about old boards coming back, I think the problem must be that your local cache somehow still contains the old boards and it’s trying to bring them back. I thought I had fixed that last week but I guess it’s still not quite right. I’m investigating that now but migration problems are particularly time consuming to test so it may take a little while to fix any issues I find.

So in the meantime, I think you may be able to solve all of the problems by signing out and back in. That clears the local cache and resets it to the database version. I think the bug is specifically in the desktop apps, but doing it in web/mobile apps too wouldn’t hurt.

I’m really sorry about this! This is the top priority to fix so we will fix it ASAP.

Jay

SamMarrocco I’ve been testing migration and everything I can think of for hours and can’t find any sync problems anywhere. I can’t even figure out how a local cache could get to the point where it would cause these problems.

The only other thing I can think of is that maybe your iPhone or iPad app hadn’t been used in a while and was on an old version from last week before some sync bugs were fixed? It updates to the new version after opening and closing it, so if it hadn’t been opened in a while it may have still been an old version.

If they’re still happening after signing out and back in, would you like to do a video call with me to try to track it down? If so send me an email to support@legendapp.com and we can coordinate there.

SamMarrocco

Jay
No, every instance of Legend has been updated (Web, Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad at the same time each time an update has been available. And all are restarted immediately afterwards and left running for at least several minutes.

This morning I launched my iPhone app and again, is says “SAVING” at the bottom and that doesn’t go away until a restart of the app..

Jay

Jerud This bug with scrambled formatting on underlined text is fixed in the latest beta update. It was just a display bug, not actual scrambling of the text, so it’ll appear correct after the update.

I haven’t been able to reproduce the note items going missing. Have you seen that since recent updates? If so, do you have more of an idea what the pattern is?

SamMarrocco

Jay
I just signed out, signed in, made sure all instances were the same newest version, then waited several minutes.
My iPhone is showing a totally different set of items in the main document with barely any items, totally different from the Mac OS and Windows versions. The Mac and Windows versions match.

Jay

SamMarrocco Did the iPhone version initially show all of the items and then they disappeared? Or were they just not all there after it loaded? Just to make sure, the pane is not filtered or collapsed? And can you try restarting the iPhone app now? While testing the large pastes issue I noticed that on the first load it sometimes doesn’t show all items but then does after refresh/restart. I’m looking into that now - it doesn’t seem to happen every time so it’s hard to reproduce.

SamMarrocco

Jay

The pane is expanded and there are no filters present.
They were there last night. There were gone this morning after the “SAVING” message was frozen and I restarted/updated/loggedout/in the app again.
-Two hours later this morning, the SAVING message is back on the bottom of the iPhone app. I haven’t touched it for two hours. It appears after a while, then stays there until I restart the app. I did all this, and now the iPhone is back in sync with the other instances, but the items are still a mess from how they were left last night.

I have now re-ordered all my items and repasted those that were missing back into place. I then restarted all apps.

All my instances are now in sync and all boards are correct.

SamMarrocco

Jay

Two hours later, after having done nothing in any instances of Legend: Looked at (still running) iOS / iPhone Legend, and SAVING appeared at the bottom.

Tried to make some changes to the Windows Document contents, and the changes are not being made to the iPhone version. Changes made to the iPhone version are not being made to the Windows version.

It appears that, after a while of running in the background with the phone sleeping, the iPhone version goes to “SAVING” mode, and is then either frozen or not syncing in either direction. Perhaps it is crashing during a SAVE after being brought into the foreground?

I then force quit the iPhone app, and restarted it and now it has synchronized itself again with the Windows version.

Jay

SamMarrocco Thank you for tracking all that down! It definitely sounds like a mobile specific problem. I’ll focus on testing the mobile app and see if I can reproduce that.

SamMarrocco

Jay
As close an I can get to a repeatable procedure is this:

With Legend running and a document visible with more than one screen of text,….
Swipe up from the bottom of the screen on the iPhone to ‘minimize’ the Legend app and bring you back to the home screen.
Turn off the iPhone (NOT a power down).
-Let the phone sit at least 10 minutes. During this time, do not make any changes to the Legend account from any instances.
-After 10 minutes, ‘run’ the Legend app on the iPhone (which brings it from where it was already running in the background to the foreground).
Scroll down all the way to the bottom of the current document.
Now scroll all the way back up to the top (past) of the document. The document bounces back into view.

At this point, after a second or so, the SAVING prompt usually appears at the bottom of the screen (in the center, just above the “Outline” icon. SAVING never goes away, and although you can scroll the document and changes things, but synchronization seems to be broken from this point forward, and the only way to get synching working again is to force-quite the app and restart it.

Jay

SamMarrocco I just released an update to beta that I think should fix this. It looks like you’re using the stable version though, and I’ll release it to stable tomorrow.

This fixes the two bugs I mentioned above and I think it should fix the iPhone getting stuck on SAVING. I also saw a minor crash in the calendar sync that you hit in our error reporter and fixed that too - it’s possible that crashed during save and broke something. Let me know after you get the next update tomorrow if that fixed it? I’ll keep testing backgrounding on my phone and see if I can reproduce it getting stuck saving.

And if it’s still not working right, what iPhone are you using?

Jay

Ok thanks to your repeatable procedure hint I managed to reproduce two problems when running a desktop app and a mobile app:

A small bug where the mobile app was savings its scroll state immediately on load
A bigger bug where because on load it already had a pending scroll state change, it would save that to the remote database and overwrite the Mobile board with only a scroll state and nothing else.

I never managed to get the phone to get stuck on SAVING though. I think that these fixes will fix that symptom, but I’m not 100% sure.

I’m just testing it some more and then I’ll release an update.

SamMarrocco

Jay
I tried the beta version on iPhone/iPad, and the SAVING/sync stops working is still happening for iOS.

SamMarrocco

Sorry, I missed this response.
To answer your questions, I’m on an iPhone 14 Pro Max on the most current iOS.

Once that “SAVING” message appears, all synching stops until a force quit, but it doesn’t stop you from changing items, which leads to the ‘synchronization race condition’ mentioned in thread previously where this happens:

you make a change to a Windows (no synch happens), you make a change to iPhone (no synch happens)
Then you make a change to the same item in iOS (no synch happens).
You realize that synching isn’t happening, you restart the iOS Legend.
Synchronization now happens, but because the last change was made on the iOS version, the sync overwrites the changes made on Windows with the changes made on iOS.

A thought….perhaps is there is a chance that synching has crashed (some type of error trap perhaps), there should be an option for the user in prefs to prevent changing anything in legend? While I appreciate the potential need for someone who doesn’t rely on synching to be able to make changes locally to a document, for those of use that live and die by synching it would be advantageous to have an option labeled:

Do not allow changes unless sync is working

Or at least, an option for a giant warning that cannot be missed by the user (SYNC NOT POSSIBLE) or a red background.

Jorge

SamMarrocco Not sure if this helps, but I had been working with my desktop app for several days (about 10 or 11) and in my other laptop I opened the browser version. That laptop had not been used in more than 3 weeks. It showed offline for a while and then it went to online status, but noticed that many changes had not applied, so I clicked into the Online status and it showed that the last sync had finished 3 weeks ago. I left it be because I knew there were a ton of changes coming through. Suddenly it changed to Saving status and remained there for about 30 minutes. I knew there were tons and tons of changes coming so I just let it be there. When I came back saving had finished and my changes had made it. I ve learned that when it says saving its because its taking too long to finish the sync and the best thing is just to leave it alone until it finishes catching up.

SamMarrocco

Jorge thanks Jorge, but unfortunately not. The changes are relatively simple, and the SAVING message never goes away no matter how long I wait. Once it appears, the app won’t sync until it is restarted. It is totally repeatable.

Jay

I noticed it’s setting the status to SAVING if it has outstanding changes even when offline. So it may actually be that the iOS app is just getting stuck offline. I will release an update to fix that message soon, which would help track down the actual issue. But my theory is that it might be an iOS specific problem. I’m working on an update to the iOS native app itself which may help, and I’ll keep testing on iOS to see if I can track it down.

SamMarrocco

Jay
It is definitely staying offline once the SAVING message appears.
It is definitely an iOS specific problem. I have not seen this on any platform other than iPAD and iPhone when trying to duplicate the issue with repeatable steps.

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