[geohashdroid:49] Geohash Droid 0.8.0-pre3

[CaptainSpam]

I just pushed 0.8.0-pre3 to the code site. If all goes well, this
will effectively be what I'll use for the 0.8.0 release.

The major thing is that the tracker is now its own background service
that keeps running if you interrupt the map (phone call, pressing
Home, switching to another app, etc). It'll stop if you press Back or
use the Quit option in the menu.

You may wonder why I did this. Well, it's the first step in me
putting a tracklog function in the app, as well as adding in the home
screen widget...

But if you can test it, please do. A lot of it has changed, and while
I try to test it as well as I can, I'd like to make sure.

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[Thomas]

Hi Capt'n,

I have tried the new version of the droid today, and unfortunately I
must report that it hangs and crashes quite often. It usually just
gets stuck as soon as it has been showing the map for a short while -
the GPS location fails to update, and eventually (or when pressing a
button) I get the 'the application is not responding / force close'
dialog.

Sorry for the unspecific report, I'll try to find out more.

Best regards,
Thomas

[CaptainSpam]

Hm... That's not good at all. I can understand why it might not
update the location (I may be overzealously detecting if the GPS
signal dies and not sending updates from GeohashService, and that I
can probably fix quickly), but as for it hanging entirely? That's
quite strange. Though I can see there being some problems, as 0.8.0
effectively redoes the entire tracking backend (changes which should
make it easier to do tracklogs soon).

If you can get a good situation in which it does this repeatedly,
please let me know. Or, if you get the "application not responding"
message, if you have the option, try telling it "Report". I'm not
sure if that option only shows up on Froyo phones or if it gets
compiled in as a part of the new SDK, though.

Thanks!

On May 29, 6:53 pm, Thomas <thomas.hir...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Capt'n,
>
> I have tried the new version of the droid today, and unfortunately I
> must report that it hangs and crashes quite often. It usually just
> gets stuck as soon as it has been showing the map for a short while -
> the GPS location fails to update, and eventually (or when pressing a
> button) I get the 'the application is not responding / force close'
> dialog.
>
> Sorry for the unspecific report, I'll try to find out more.
>
> Best regards,
> Thomas
>

[CaptainSpam]

Oh, dear. I think I saw why it's not updating after a while. Turns
out it WAS a side effect of the dead GPS signal problem, in that it
wouldn't ever come back up if it was a temporary outage for whatever
reason.

I can fix that right away, though I'm still concerned about the part
where it hangs. That's still a problem, since I don't know what would
cause that right offhand.

Thanks!

On May 29, 6:53 pm, Thomas <thomas.hir...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Capt'n,
>
> I have tried the new version of the droid today, and unfortunately I
> must report that it hangs and crashes quite often. It usually just
> gets stuck as soon as it has been showing the map for a short while -
> the GPS location fails to update, and eventually (or when pressing a
> button) I get the 'the application is not responding / force close'
> dialog.
>
> Sorry for the unspecific report, I'll try to find out more.
>
> Best regards,
> Thomas
>

[CaptainSpam]

All right, I've got version 0.8.1-pre1 on the website right now.
Though globalhash support is the main thing I have in it, I also have
a minor fix which might take care of the GPS hangs. Maybe.

If it doesn't, well, it still is a legitimate fix anyway. And if you
can get any more information, that'd really help.

Enjoy!

On May 29, 6:53 pm, Thomas <thomas.hir...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Capt'n,
>
> I have tried the new version of the droid today, and unfortunately I
> must report that it hangs and crashes quite often. It usually just
> gets stuck as soon as it has been showing the map for a short while -
> the GPS location fails to update, and eventually (or when pressing a
> button) I get the 'the application is not responding / force close'
> dialog.
>
> Sorry for the unspecific report, I'll try to find out more.
>
> Best regards,
> Thomas
>

[Joe]

I saw this issue last Friday (July 9) as well. I don't think I lost
GPS signal along the trip, or if I did, it was for only a very brief
amount of time once or twice. On my short trip of about 3 (5km) the
application hung twice on the map screen. It was a cloud-free day,
and I was on urban streets with little to no tree cover, though I was
in a car. The map would slowly get more and more sluggish to update
until it finally hung and the error message above popped up.

I am using version 0.8.2 on a Motorola Droid (Android 2.1).

P.S. Great work in general, I love it!

--Joe (aperfectring)

[CaptainSpam]

Drat, then. I guess I didn't get it fixed after all.

The problem is, it's still not quite enough to go on for me to figure
out just what went wrong. Though, the fact that it seemed to get more
and more sluggish does suggest a memory leak. Which is kind of odd,
given what's going on at that point, I'd think a LOT more people
would've reported this if it is a memory leak.

If you can get any more information out of it (most importantly, a way
to reproduce it regularly), that would help a lot. Once 2.2 hits for
the Droid, you'll be able to send stack traces when it freezes or
crashes, which is also good (right now, the developer console I have
just gives me a notice that it wasn't sent from a Froyo client and
doesn't have the stack trace). If I can get enough to figure this
out, I'll try to get it fixed, but I'm still a bit lost with what's
going on so far.

Thanks!

[Thomas Hirsch]

I have been using it for a while now and can add some more, if fuzzy,
information. I guess it's difficult for people to report if it does
not exactly not work at all or give clear error messages.

As soon as the geohashing daemon starts, the phone becomes rather
sluggish.
It would suggest high CPU usage to me, but I have no idea how to
verify this, except for the battery drain which is noticeable.

There are a few symptoms:
- The battery drain. Compared to other apps which require the GPS to
be running to generate a tracklog (e.g. everytrail), the battery
lifetime is ridiculously small. I can do about four to six hours of
logging with everytrail, but never managed to get more than two with
the new geohashdroid daemon active.
- The Map[tm] becomes unresponsive often. It is common for the map to
hang, not updating the GPS location or reacting on button presses.
Force closing the map will leave the geohashdroid daemon running (and
the phone sluggish). (Is there an equivalent of a force close for an
unresponsive daemon btw.?)
- Other apps crash and the phone handling itself becomes slow.

This being that and hard to track down, would it be possible to add an
option to disable the daemon? Unless I decide I want to keep a
tracklog, the daemon does not give me additional value. At the same
time it keeps the GPS busy, which significantly shortens the battery
lifetime - when compared to using the GPS only when you are actually
looking at it. Using a cached map like the norgeskart app, and only
turning on GPS or data when I am at intersections or want to post to
the wiki allows me to go for two days of expeditioning and hardly use
a quarter of my battery.

YMMV... that's what it does for me currently. And it's a pity because
it has been a great app before the daemon. Now I really only turn it
on to get that nice info screen when I am on location, and I often
refrain from posting to the wiki, because I risk to have to reboot my
phone.

Thomas

[CaptainSpam]

Well, that's part of why I keep the last of the 0.7 releases on the
main GHD website, in case something like this went wrong with
GeohashService (0.8.0 was the first release with GHS). I mean, it's
entirely possible I'm doing something wrong with the callbacks and
something isn't being closed out right, or I'm not understanding
something pretty key in how services are supposed to work, but, at
least fundamentally, I'm not sure what in GHS would cause it to leak
memory like that.

Unfortunately, making the service a simple option is a lot harder than
it sounds. I've made GHS pretty well entwined with the rest of the
classes at this point (MainMap, the detailed info screen, and both
wiki editors now listen to it instead of doing their own GPS
tracking), and it'd be sort of ugly to keep both of them in-code at
the same time. It'd turn into an unmaintainable mess in short order
if I did that.

As per the battery issue, if you're actually in the application
(MainMap, detailed info, wiki editor), it'll grab GPS updates as
quickly as possible. If you've returned home and kept the service
running, you can set it to only get updates every 30 seconds (or so)
with the Power Saver option in the settings screen (this isn't the
default because some phones, like the Droid, don't seem to like
pulling GPS out of power saver properly). That's all I can do,
besides slowing down GPS while on the map itself (like, only getting
fixes every 10 seconds or so). Do you know if things like everytrail
keep the GPS running full-tilt while it's going, or does it tone it
down significantly?

But, like I said, the 0.7 releases are still on the website, if
that'll help. I'll go over the service callbacks again once I've got
time and see if I'm missing something obvious. Worst case, I'll try
backporting the non-service-related changes to 0.7 and make a new
release on the website (and if I can find a better way around it when
I get tracklog support, maybe I'll remove the service altogether).
I'll also test it more on the G1 (you still have a G1, right,
Thomas?). I've been doing most of the latest testing on my Nexus One
and my test Droid, each of which are significantly faster than the G1,
and that might be what's causing a large amount of the sluggishness.

I'll keep looking into this.

[CaptainSpam]

Huh. Well, would you look at that? I just did some quick usage
testing on the way to work today, and sure enough, in both MainMap and
the detailed info screen, my Nexus One ground to a halt and/or
rebooted itself about four or five times along the way. That's weird
indeed. Even worse, this was from a fresh boot each time, going
straight into GHD and running today's point.

So in case you're wondering, no, you're apparently NOT crazy, this IS
causing problems. :-) I'll look into it more when I get back from
work. If I can't find anything obviously wrong with the service, I'll
work on backporting the more recent changes into a serviceless
version.

[CaptainSpam]

Oh, and I'm starting a new discussion for this at the top level with a
different subject header so it'll be easier for new people coming in
to see what's going on.

[CaptainSpam]

Just a note, if there don't seem to be any problems, I'll release the
fixed version Sunday at some point. It kind of IS an important fix
and all, given it tends to lock up the entire phone... :-)

[Thomas]

I should be able to test it tomorrow (monday) during a real
expedition. But feel free not to wait for me - I am a bit laggy these
days. :)

[CaptainSpam]

Well, the main reason I ask is just to make sure I'm not crazy and
that I'm not overlooking something obvious. It pays to have other
people test it and all. :-)

On Jul 18, 2:56 pm, Thomas <thomas.hir...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I should be able to test it tomorrow (monday) during a real
> expedition. But feel free not to wait for me - I am a bit laggy these
> days. :)
>

[CaptainSpam]

As far as I could test it, it looks like I've got everything
backported that needed to be backported. So, 0.7.6 is in the
Marketplace! Yes, I went with the 0.7.x line. Made more sense.

Enjoy! I'll try to figure out what went wrong in the meantime.

[Thomas]

Good news: after having eventually hashed now with the new old droid
(belatedly with the pre-version you sent us) I can confirm that no
more noticeable memory or CPU hogging has happened! :)

[CaptainSpam]

Excellent! So that helped, at least. Thanks! :-)

I'll try to figure out just what went wrong later on. I've got
another feature or two to add in that doesn't rely on the service.