Android: first http response always takes longer (even without keep-alive) - android

I am using the class HttpUrlConnection for requesting JSON responses
I realized that no matter if I set or not
System.setProperty("http.keepAlive", "false");
The first response is always going to take longer, while the next responses are very quick, with and without keepAlive. I am not even using SSL.
Notice that, my app doesn't need to perform any authentication with the server, so there isn't any startup call to the webservices. The first request I make to the webservices is actually the very first.
I am also verifying server-side with "netstat", that by setting keepAlive false on the Android client the connections disappear straight away, while without specifying keepAlive false they keep staying as "ESTABLISHED".
How can you explain that subsequent responses are quicker even if the connection doesn't persist?
ANDROID CODE:
line 1) URL url = new URL(stringUrl);
line 2) HttpURLConnection urlConnection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
line 3) InputStream instream = new BufferedInputStream(urlConnection.getInputStream());
Until line 2 everything always gets executed very quickly, either with keepAlive or not. Line 3 in the first request takes around 3 seconds, while in all subsequent always less than 1 second. Each request is about 0.5KB gzipped.
SYSTEM:
I am testing using a Nexus 5, connected via 3G
My webservices are written in Go, running on a CentOS 6.4 linux server
I am using standard tcp v4
UPDATE:
For the moment I have decided to use a trick: when the fragment is resuming, I make a HTTP HEAD request to the server. In this way all subsequent calls in the next 10 seconds are very quick. If the user waits more than 10 seconds then the first one will be slow, and the next ones will be quick again. This is all happening without using KeepAlive.
It's a really big mistery now. It looks like there is some kind of "awake" period which lasts for about 10 seconds. I don't think there is anything strange on my code which can result on that. Also because everything seems to happen during the line 3 I reported above.
SOLVED! thanks to Mark Allison!
Here is a very clear explanation:
http://developer.android.com/training/efficient-downloads/efficient-network-access.html
Also, everything can easily be monitored using Android DDMS's Network Statistics. If you wait some seconds (let's say 20) from last request, you can see that it takes 2 seconds to transmit a new request.

I suspect that the lag that you are seeing is simply down to the cellular radio transitioning from either low power or idle state to full power (which can take over 2 seconds).
Check out Reto Meier's excellent DevBytes series on Efficient Data Transfer for an in-depth explanation of what's going on.

The first request cannot leverage a keep-alive obviously, because thankfully Android doesn't keep the connections alive for minutes or hours. Only subsequent requests can reuse keep-alive connections and only after a short period of time.
It's natural that you have to wait in line 3. Before something like conn.getResponseCode() or conn.getInputStream() the HttpURLConnection is in CREATED state. There is no network activity until it's getting in CONNECTED state. Buffered* shouldn't make any difference here.
I've observed long delays when using SSL and there was a time-shift between server and device. This happens very often when using an emulator which is not cold-booted. For that I've a small script running before test. It's important that PC and emulator are in the same time-zone, otherwise it's very contra-productive: (see below, because it's hard to show the command inline).
I can imagine that Android saves battery in putting 3G into sleep mode when there is no activity. This is just speculation, but you could make a test by creating some other network activity with other apps (browser, twitter, ...) and then see whether your app needs the same long "think time" until first connection.
There are other good options for losing time: DNS resolution, Server-side "sleep" (e.g. a virtual machine loading "memory" from disk).
The command to set time of Android emulator:
adb -e shell date -s `date +"%Y%m%d.%H%M%S"`
Edit
To further analyze the problem, you could run tcpdump on your server. Here is tutorial in case you don't know it well. Store the dumps to files (pcap) and then you can view them with wireshark. Depending on the traffic on your CentOS server you have to set some filters so you only record the traffic from your Android device. I hope that this gives some insight to the problem.
To exclude your server from being the bad guy, you could create a small script with curl commands doing the equivalent as your app.
You could create a super-tiny service without database or other i/o dependencies and measure the performance. I don't know "Go", but the best thing would be a static JSON file delivered by Apache or nginx. If you only have Go, then take something like /ping -> { echo "pong" }. Please tell us your measurements and observations.

Instead of using so many classes I suggest you use this library
you can have a look at here
http://loopj.com/android-async-http/
your code will become very very less , instead of declaring so many classes writing bulk of code , you can just use 4 lines of code
AsyncHttpClient client = new AsyncHttpClient();
client.get("http://www.google.com", new AsyncHttpResponseHandler() {
#Override
public void onSuccess(String response) {
System.out.println(response);
}
});
It is very efficient in geting the response very quickly(1 or 2 secs including parsing).
I hope this will help you out. :)

Related

EML327 not responding after 15-20 minutes

I have implemented successfully the pires/obd-java-api OBD Interface in an Android app and everything works as expected, expect that after about 1.000 - 1.500 API calls, the API stops responding.
Did anyone come across the same problem?
Is it maybe necessary to send a reset command to the OBD dongle after some time?
I thought it might be that the API is collecting data and a memory problem occurs, but onTrimMemory is never called.
I assume API means Standard Pids(mode 1)then OBD will not response in following case
1: TimeoutCommand is too low, set 255
2: may be not proper power supply
Note: ResetCommand is used as initial command once before fetching real time data.
you can refer android-obd-reader sample app:
https://github.com/md-sohrab-alam/android-obd-reader

HttpURL connection what is the recommended value for setConnectionTimeout and setReadTimeOut?

I Want to know what is the recommended value for methods setConnectionTimeou() and
setReadTimeOut() for HttpURL connection? I know these value depends upon the server and what task server is performing. but still i want to know the recommended values for these method.
It's hard to answer such question without knowing the typical response time. Users are fairly accustomed to wait a few seconds when using mobile devices whilst on mobile networks.
Personally if the timeout is between 10 - 15s I will consider it a normal latency, if it is 20s or more, I will most likely quit the app.
From Default Documentation
Both setConnectTimeout (int timeout) and setReadTimeout (int timeout) From API 1
A SocketTimeoutException is thrown if the connection could not be established in this time. Default is 0 which stands for an infinite timeout.
see this link its give you more idea about this.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/website-response-times/
You can do it this example:
Your method
How to add parameters to HttpURLConnection using POST
OR
You can follow this other form
https://developer.android.com/reference/java/net/HttpURLConnection.html

How to start a method in the same time on 2 devices

I have 2 android phones phones, both connected to the same wifi, both with bluetooth.
I want some method that syncs somehow the phones and starts a function on the same time on both phones.
For example playing a song at the same time.
I already tried with bluetooth but its with lag, sometimes 0.5 secs. I want something in +- 0.01sec if possible.
Someone suggesting playing it in the future with 2-3 seconds, sending the time-stamp, but how do you sync the internal clocks of the devices then ?
Before calling that particular method, try to measure the latency between the two devices:
1.First device says Hi(store the current time)
2.Second device receives the Hi.
3.Second device says back Hi !!
4.First device receives the Hi.((storedTime - currentTime) / 2 )
Now you have the latency, send your request to second device to start your particular method and start it on first one after the latency.
Try to measure the latency 5 to 10 times to be more accurate.
you have a way to transfer data between the devices right ?
if so you can send a time-stamp which is in the future,
ex: if the present time stamp is 1421242326 you send 1421242329 or something and start the function at that time on both devices.
Basically use #Dula's suggestion (device 1 sends command to device 2 and gives a "start time" which lies in the future). Both devices then start the action at the same time (in the future).
To make sure that the devices are synchronized, you can use a server-based time sync (assuming that both devices have Internet access). To do this, each device contacts the same server (using NTP, or HTTP-based NTP, or contacts a known HTTP server, like www.google.com and uses the value in the "Date" header of the HTTP response). The "server-date" is compared to the system clock on the device, and the difference is the "time-offset from server-time". The time-offsets can be used to synchronize on the "server-time", which is then used as the time base for the actual action (playing the media, etc.).
If your WiFi router allows clients to talk to each other (many public hotspots disable this), you could implement a simple socket listener on one (or each) device and have the initiating device broadcast a message.
For more complicated things and network flexibility, I've had good success with connected sessions using AllJoin. There is a bit of a learning curve to do interesting things, but the simple stuff is pretty easy once you understand the architecture.
Use a server to provide a synchronous event to just the two clients who have decclared their mutual affinity (random as a parm and pair serializer Partner-1 or Partner-2 which they share prior to their respectve calls for the sync event).
Assume both clients on same subnet (packets from 2 events serialized on the server , arrive across the network at the 2 clients simultaneously client-side) This provides synchronous PLays by 2 , bound clients.
The event delivered by server is either a confirm to play queued selected track OR a broadcast( decoupled, more formal)
The only tricky thing is the server side algorythm implementing this:
Queue a pair of requests or error
Part1, part2 with same Random value constitute valid pair if both received before either times out.
On a valid pair schedule both to the same future event in their respective , committed responses.
OnSchedule do the actual IO for 2 paired requests. Respective packets will arrive back at respective clients at same time, each response having been subject to equal network latency
Ng if two diff carrier 4G or lte networks involved. (Oops)
This thing is possible via socket, you will send a event via socket then the other device receive that event. For learn socket io chat
maybe it's not the answer you are looking for but i think that due to the high precision you are wanting , you should look for a push technology, i advice you to take look at SignalR. It's real time technology which gives you abstraction of sending methods , it have a built-in methods like Clients.All.Broadcast that fit your needs.
You can try to use some MQTT framework to send message between two device, or into a set with more number of devices.

Getting "SocketException : Connection reset by peer" in Android

My app needs to contact the same device it is working on, via http://127.0.0.1/... (a localhost url).
For some reason, about 50% of the times (and maybe exactly 50%) when I reach a website there with JSON content, I get the exception:
java.net.SocketException: recvfrom failed: ECONNRESET (Connection reset by peer)
For the other 50%, I get perfectly good results. I've tried to do polls (and even large delay between polls), but I keep getting the same weird results.
I've searched the internet and also here, and I'm not sure why it occurs. Does the peer mean that the client has caused it? Why does it happen, and how should i handle it?
Some websites say that it's a common thing, but I didn't find what's the best thing to do in such cases.
Ok, the answer was that it's the server's fault - it had to close the connection after each request.
It might be that Android keeps a pool of connections and use the old one or something like that.
Anyway , now it works.
EDIT: according to the API of HttpURLConnection, this can be solved on the client side too:
The input and output streams returned by this class are not buffered.
Most callers should wrap the returned streams with BufferedInputStream
or BufferedOutputStream. Callers that do only bulk reads or writes may
omit buffering. When transferring large amounts of data to or from a
server, use streams to limit how much data is in memory at once.
Unless you need the entire body to be in memory at once, process it as
a stream (rather than storing the complete body as a single byte array
or string).
To reduce latency, this class may reuse the same underlying Socket for
multiple request/response pairs. As a result, HTTP connections may be
held open longer than necessary. Calls to disconnect() may return the
socket to a pool of connected sockets. This behavior can be disabled
by setting the http.keepAlive system property to false before issuing
any HTTP requests. The http.maxConnections property may be used to
control how many idle connections to each server will be held.
Taken from:
developer.android.com/reference/java/net/HttpURLConnection.html
Try to set this property for your HttpURLConnection before connecting:
conn.setRequestProperty("connection", "close");
This will disable "keep-alive" property which is on by default.
This is an old thread i know. But this might help someone.
In my case this error was caused by the .NET WCF (soap) service. One of the objects in the returning result had a DataMember with get{} property but no set{} property.
For serialization to occur every DataMember should have both get{} & set{} available. I implemented an empty set{} (empty due to my business rules), and problem was solved.
My scenerio is a specific bad server implementation, but maybe it'll help someone saving time when troubleshooting.
I was having a lot of these Connection reset by peer when I was visiting certain web pages or downloading files (from my app or the Android browser).
Turned out it was my 3G carrier that blocked the connections (e.g. downloading an .exe file was forbidden).
Do you have the same problem on Wifi ?
in my situation the problem has been solved by cleaning the proxy address and port from APN which was produced by the operator.
as I have tested, using IP address of remote server instead of domain name also can solve the problem.
In our case the issue is in the Server side (Application Pool configuration in IIS). I resolved it by setting Maximum Worker Processes to 1. Setting it with value more than 1 will enable Web Garden which seems to be the issue.

HttpClient times out when changing from 3G to WiFi

I perform some large downloads. I start a download being connected to 3G, all is fine. Then, I switch to WiFi connection, but the request returns a timeout exception. I have used HttpClient library. I have implemented a retry mechanism, so, when the request returns an exception, it sleeps for 0.5 seconds and tries to execute again and again. I would expect that, after connecting to a WiFi, the Http request could execute. But it seems that the Http execute method returns a null response, all the time after that. Very strange, if I commute again to 3G, the execute method returns again a good response. Can anyone help me please :) ?
First, it seems that it may be more convenient to use DownloadManager for large files - it handles retry and everything.
As for HttpClient - it's known to have some issues, but i'm not sure if you bumped into one of them or just overlooked something. It's been deprecated as of Gingerbread, you may want to try HttpUrlConnection instead, it's said to have less problems than HttpClient.
Also, when switching between WIFI and cell connections, HttpClient may need to be reinitialized completely, there's http range header to tell server which byte you want to continue downloading from. But again, I suggest you give DownloadManager a try, it may save you a lot of time.
This might be a routing problem:
when switching between different network types usually the local ip address and, more important, the local routing table changes, due to a different gateway being used. This means that packages that traveled fine between client and server wont reach any destination after a network change, if they are send the same route. Most likely your client implementation has to be notified of the change or even restartet completely, so that the routing strategy is reinitilized.
If the documentation of the implementation components you use dont reveal anything you could try to track this down using a package sniffer like wireshark. Typically packages running into nirwhana show up easily there.

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