Three performance issues: Syncing, rendering, and energy consumption

[Kirk_Masden]

In this post, I'd like to summarize some points about performance that have been made in the past and ask for some clarification about the third type of performance issue -- energy consumption (battery drain, smartphone heating up, etc.).

First, in regard to the distinction between syncing performance and rendering (or interactive) performance, Praveen (@pravse ) responded to a post of mine as follows last year:

"Rendering performance is really about what we ask the device/browser to do when a users taps on something or scrolls something. The processor on a device is slow and if you ask it to do a lot of computation, it will make the UI feel “sluggish” (takes a noticeable time for a UI response). Expensive format rules fall in this category, as do expensive searches, as you point out. Also, if you had a very large data set and open a view on it, it could be slow if all the data has to be processed in some way."

https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/AppSheet-Q-A/Disabled-expensive-Format-rules-vs-performance/...

And, in regard to battery consumption, Praveen wrote as follows in another thread:

"Battery drain would occur if the app is trying to connect to the network to sync in the background.
Can you disable background sync totally (just enable Delayed Sync) to see if this helps?"

https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/AppSheet-Q-A/Battery-Drain-One-of-my-pilot-users-is-indi/m-p...

Here's my situation:

My rather large app (which I've been tweaking for several years now, adding functions, etc.) works quite well both in terms of syncing performance and rendering performance. The problem I've noticed recently is that it seems to be a power hog on my phone. It's an app for studying vocabularly and I wound up using it to pass the time on a long train trip recently. The phone became quite warm as I used it and the battery usage display indicated that AppSheet was using about 80% of the power on the phone. In the case of this app, it's really necessary to keep background syncing on because using the app involves frequent writing to the sheet and not having background syncing on would mean accumulating a large backlog of data to sync. I don't want to make users have to wait for such a sync.

Here's my question:

Are there other factors that may be contributing to energy consumption? I have virtual columns in a sheet with several thousand rows. Those columns are relatively simple (no SELECT expressions, etc.) but they don't need to be recalculated so I could fix the app to have them written to the sheet, if that would help.

And one related question:

I'm one of a group of people who have asked about "background background syncing," that is, background syncing that continues when you are using a different app on your device:

https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Feature-Ideas/Background-background-syncing/idi-p/304214

I wonder if such improved syncing is in the works and if anyone is looking into making background syncing less energy intensive.

[1minManager]

This is a question, almost impossible to answer as you cannot get enough information from a phone to workout exactly what the CPU useage is.  My initial suggestion is that it's probably not all Appsheets fault.  I have a OnePlus 6 approx 4 years old.  The battery isn't what it used to be but if its fully charged it will last 24-36 hours if not used.  Or maybe 8 hours under 'normal' daily useage.

My morning routine is to read the Daily Mail news via their app with a coffee.  In the last 12 months this App has started draining the battery like mad.  Such that it can strip about 50% of the battery within 15-20mins.  Note that all im doing is reading text - no videos or animation involved.  Some might say that this is because the battery is old.  But the phone gets really hot as well, indicating its related to CPU useage.

I've tried a few things but without much success.  Putting the phone in powersaving mode seems to help slightly.  But my hunch is it just limits the processing power of the CPU - the App is still mightly inefficent.  No other app seems to affect the phone in such an extreme way, even games don't drain it this fast.

I don't think there is probably anything you can do to the App itself to make it more efficent.  Sounds like you've got the sync time quite low already.

Regarding background sync, I've also had this (or the lack of it) cause problems on a timesheet App.  We had a senario where one guy seem to be submitting his time entries 1-2 weeks late.  But all the timestamps where correct.  So we'd see his time entries show up this week, but with timestamps from 2 weeks ago.  I eventually worked it out.  What he was doings was quikly rattling out 5-10 time entries, then minimising the App.  He then wouldn't touch it for a week.  Then he'd open it add 5-10 more and then minimise it again.  It didn't help than when he did this the internet was quite poor.  So the app wasn't getting enough time to upload all the changes each week.

What would be a really nice add on on would be an option to allow Appsheet to do maybe an hourly background data sync & app update so long as its on wifi and the battery is over say 50%.  This would also someone mitigate the issue of users never doing a full sync then complain when I've had the audacity to do and update.

[Kirk_Masden]

Thanks!  Since posting this, I've learned that I had an issue where very large QuickChart URLs my app makes were preventing images from loading properly when I had "Store content for offline use" turned on.  That seems to have caused the iPhone to beat its head against the wall trying over and over to load the image.  I still have a ticket open on that issue with Support.  But, since turning off "Store content for offline use" my app doesn't seem to use a huge amount of energy:

https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/AppSheet-Q-A/Image-loading-gets-stuck/m-p/460685/highlight/t...