Hey all!
I had a longer session last weekend and decided to do it indoors.
I always have my Garmin recording the session just in case something happens. I was surprised that the session on TrainerDay took more 7min to complete the 2h30min of training.
I don’t know why the time took longer to pass on the TrainerDay App.
Device: iPad mini 4
OS Version: 15.7.5
TrainerDay app version: 3.6.4
Yes the problem is our app requires a lot of CPU and memory so your iPad mini will struggle to keep up. It’s mostly a problem in long workouts. For some devices making sure restarting the device and making sure to shut of as many apps in the background as possible can help but I am afraid with a mini it and long workouts it will struggle. We keep trying to improve the performance of our app but have not solved this yet. I wish I had better news.
What about a warning for these lower end devices or even block them for using some parts of it or/and too long workouts?
I don’t have this problem, but we need to trust the software and the data.
Should be possible to scan the hardware and give the user a warning or something of a failsafe that activates if it goes out of time, etc.
Do the data afterwards fits with reality or is all the data corrupt if something like this happens?
I think this needs attention, seems like a mayor thing, users need to trust workout software/data.
I fully agree with you on the importance of predictability. My guess is this happens to less than 1% of all the workouts performed.
We really don’t know when it will have this problem or not. People can have newer devices but have lots of things running that we are not aware of and it can cause this problem as well, it seems to happen more on iOS then Android, or possibly only on iOS. If someones battery gets below 20% which we also have no visibility to it can go into low power mode which slows things down. It can happen in workouts as short as 60 minutes in the worst case scenarios.
But to your point when it starts happening I think we might be able to catch it and warn someone which would be better than having to come to the forum and ask. I also believe when the clock starts running slow, putting the app in the background and bringing it back can improve it. The biggest problem is we have a lot of devices and can’t replicate this no matter how long we run workouts, so when you can’t repeat it, it makes it hard to fix or even know how to identify it. We have run 3 hour tests and all are 100% accurate on all our devices with a variety of workouts. If we had big money like TrainerRoad does we could devote a lot more effort to solving this but we are still so small. But it is always a top priority to fixing so we come back to it again and again. Slowly we improve performance and it happens less and less often.
Sorry for the long response that sounds like an excuse, it is very frustrating / sad for us as well.
Hi Alex
Sadly I have this issue too on many rides of more than an hour. I’ve seen the other tread on this and so about every 30 /45 mins will put the app in the background as suggested and this does work although once I saw the time speed up to 4/5 times normal when brought back to the foreground - I put it in the background and brought it forward again and the clock returned to normal speed (albeit it was now a minute or more up on where it should have been).
I use an iPad Air 2 running the latest (for it) iOS 15.7.5. I appreciate this is an old machine (2015) but has essentially nothing else on it as it’s just used for turbo training and runs plugged in.
The iPad is old but still a pretty powerful machine judging by the impressive games it can still run and whilst I’m no expert in any way I’d assume Trainer Day could be made to run effectively too.
I appreciate most people probably run newer/faster machines than me but to paraphrase you above - an app used to time stuff that can’t keep reliable time is a bit frustrating.
I’m not technical but more than happy to help you out with trying to provide some insight/data/testing to help track the issue down - just let me know if there is anything I can do.
cheers
Stephen
We are using what is called React Native that allows us to run multiple platforms at once, keeping our costs lower. It’s one of the best technologies for this but it is not as efficient as native code, and it does not have the concept of a millisecond accurate timer, so we have to make millisecond adjustments each second to keep things accurate. When things run slow or fast we are trying to speed it up that is why you see this catch up process.
So anyway, we would have to re-write our app and have a bigger team to support native code. We have tried to do lots of performance enhancements but have not found any. There probably is something that can be done but we just have to keep trying things. I have an old iPad mini that I am not sure where it is. I need find it and to test it more to see if I can reproduce this. If I can it would help since we currently can’t reproduce it.
It is strange that it seems going to background mode and bring to the front on iOS some how seems to boost the resources available for our app. This would seem to be an iOS design feature but hard to say. iOS is always doing advanced stuff regarding allocating resources.
So this discussion gave my developer an idea that he can run the process that happens when the app goes in the background every 5-minute and we are hopeful that will solve this problem!!! Wow. That would be so wonderful.
Amazing.
That’s the power of you having built an engaged and active community and by just talking to folks!
Happy to test it out for you.
Hey Alex, Thanks for the updates, I can’t wait. Let me know so I can test as well.
Alex.
I too have seen the problem with the timing when using an iPad (3rd Generation) for the workouts. Using my ancient iPhoneX I don’t seem to have the problem, but I haven’t used that for a workout over 60 minutes yet. For my 70 minute workout today on the iPad I was still slogging away with over 30 minutes left after an hour and a half had elapsed. Using the stopwatch on the iPhone I see it was running about 1/2 speed on the iPad.
The session was never in the background on the iPad.
Thanks.
Peter.
Thanks, it’s hard to predict when it is going to happen as I said it never happens to us. We do have fix coming out next week that hopefully solves this once and for all.
