iPhone Battery Life Tests

Last night I was able, for the first time, to test the theory that the iPhone consumes significantly more power when doing 'push' sync with our service. I left a fully charged iPhone on a shelf in a location with 5 bars ATT 3G service, and push enabled (which is the default configuration). This morning, after 12 hours on the shelf, the iPhone's battery level indicator was still at 'full'. At first I suspected that it wasn't actually syncing so I pulled the server log records for the device. These indicated that the phone had completed a 'ping' sync operation roughly every 7 minutes all night, which is exactly what we'd expect it to do. In previous investigations, when users have reported increased battery drain over night, the server logs showed exactly the same thing: normal regular pinging.
Although this is a single data point, it does tell me that whatever is leading to the reports we see of significantly increased batter life is probably a function of the cell radio in the phone, rather than the sync client or some strange interaction with our service. Perhaps when it's in a location with marginal service it burns much more power sending packets or flipping back and forth between towers, for example.
I'm keen to dig deeper into this mystery and to do so we'll need reports from users who either do or do not see major battery drain from an otherwise idle iPhone that's using push sync. Please send any reports to support@nuevasync.com with subject 'iPhone Battery Drain Investigation'.

Update: Service Restored (was: ISP Down Hence Service is Down)

Update: our Internet service was restored a few minutes ago. Service is running normally now.

The ISP that provides connectivity to our servers is currently totally down. Yes, the entire multi-state ISP, affecting many cities and businesses. The outage began a couple of hours ago. They don't know the cause, nor how long it will take to restore service. My own investigation suggests that the problem is at their peering point with the outside world, not anywhere local to here. Needless to say we will be changing ISP as soon as we can. Apologies to our users. Service will be restored as soon as our ISP gets their act together.

iPhone 2.1 Freezing Update

I'm sure many users are wondering what's been happening with this issue. Although we're not yet able to say that the problem is 100% resolved, some significant progress has been made. After a detailed analysis of server log records from devices belonging to users who reported freezing had happened, our engineering team were able to reliably reproduce the freezing problem.
There are two parts to the freezing syndrome: why the device freezes; and the conditions that led to it getting into the frozen state. On the first part, we believe that there is the potential for deadlock in the iPhone 2.1 sync software. We're also confident that the deadlocking problem will be fixed in the next iPhone software update. We don't know when that will be released.
Freezing seems to occur when a particular set of circumstances arises : a change is pending from Google, but the iPhone times out reading the change from our servers; then later before the device has caught up with that missed change, a second change is made on the device. Having discovered the set of conditions that can lead to the device deadlock, we wondered if we could make changes to the service that would reduce or even eliminate the potential to trigger it. As a result new service code was deployed this past Wednesday. It makes sure that any changes from Google are flushed to the device soon after they are seen. The result is that any device that might have got into the pre-freezing state, where a change was missed due to a timeout, will no longer do so. Unfortunately devices that were already in that state before the new code was deployed can still freeze up. This is because our change only addresses the first stage towards freezeing, not the second, which happens outside our control, on the device.
So far the results are encouraging. The number of users reporting new freezing episodes has dropped significantly. Evidence we are able to gather from server logs is also positive.
However, I don't feel that we can declare complete victory yet. There may be other conditions that can trigger the deadlock than the ones we have studied.
We'd like to determine the best method to un-freeze a device. So far only the 'Reset All Settings' method works reliably for us, although users have reported other methods working for them here (change Neuvasync password, turn on flight mode, etc). If you have thoughts on this please post comments.

iPhone Configuration Article on theiLife.com

Nuevasync user Keith Hobin from theiLife posted an excellent article today that has a step-by-step Nuevaysync-on-iPhone configuration guide, including the first documentation we've seen on how to preserve your existing contacts and calendar events (the iPhone rather unhelpfully deletes them when you enable sync). We're grateful to Keith for taking the time to research and write the article. Thanks Keith !

Service was down for an hour or two

UPDATE: Service was restored at 12:21 MDT.

Service (including the web site) is currently down. The cause is a defective ethernet card on the router that feeds the servers. The backup router isn't responding so we need to get physical access to the server room to fix the problem. That will take a couple of hours, at which point service will be restored.
Update: actually the Ethernet port is fine, but the Linux kernel on the router has a bug that led to the interface being mis-named when the router booted. For reasons not yet understood, the router rebooted this morning and it appears to have picked up a new kernel at that point, with the bug in it. I'm updating its kernel now and that should fix the port problem.

Fixing Duplicates

Though not common, over time there have been users who have reported entries duplicated either on their device or at Google/Plaxo.  As we've made continued improvements to squash duplicates, we've kept in touch with those users.  But, we want to broaden access to that information and make sure all our users know first, where duplicates can come from, and second, how to deal with them.

By far the most common cause actually isn't a NuevaSync problem at all, but a bug in the Apple synchronization client.  The precise details are rather convoluted, but the quick version is that if an error ever happened when syncing, it was possible for the device to get confused and start adding entries it already had.

In response to that, we’ve written and deployed code that actively intercepts duplicates before they get committed.  It isn't possible to intercept 100% of duplicates this way, but the results so far have been excellent.  And since the code is in our server, it applies equally to devices of all types and versions: iPod, iPhone, Windows Mobile, Nokia, etc.

Apple apparently noticed the problem as well, and another major step came with the release of the 2.1 firmware.  When we began testing the 2.1 beta releases a few weeks ago, we noticed an improvement in the devices' behavior; they did not create duplicates in the same circumstances as the 2.0 devices.  This is a great enhancement for Apple users, and though we are still a little reserved about 2.1 (cf. some of our earlier posts), we are very pleased with this particular fix.

While those changes (and several other, smaller ones we've made) work to prevent duplicates, what do you do if you already have them?  To answer that we have created some experimental tools to "dedupe" your account.  The tools for Google Contacts and Calendar have been available for some time, but today marks the release for Plaxo.  All these tools are specifically targeted at removing duplicates which might have been created through us.  If your service offers its own tool, you may want to use that instead.  Plaxo, for example, offers an advanced duplicate merging and removal tool which is well worth a look.  Our tools are experimental and by their nature designed to delete entries.  Make a backup first and exercise caution when using them!

They can be accessed at:
https://www.nuevasync.com/PublicSite/user/tools/dedupe.htm

Detection and removal can take a few minutes, so be patient when it runs.  If a lot of entries are removed, it is probably a good idea to resync your device afterward (cf. https://www.nuevasync.com/PublicSite/user/troubleshooting.htm), but that is entirely up to you.

By raw numbers, duplicates have never been common, but nevertheless they have been one of--and perhaps the--most serious of issues to us. With these new measures, we’re hoping most users will never have a problem.  If you do, e-mail us at support@nuevasync.com and we'll do everything we can to get it fixed and you back syncing.

As always, many thanks to our users!

2.1 Firmware Investigations

Just a quick update, but following information provided by diligent users, we have some lines of investigation which we are pursuing on the freezing issue which can sometimes occur with iPhones or iPods running the new 2.1 firmware.  We've also managed to reproduce this ourselves on a test device, and are working on a consistent reproduction case to nail it down.

If you encounter this problem, please do e-mail support with the subject 'iPhone Freezing Returned'.  We've had a number of users send in reports, but more information is always good.  Please include some details about--as best you can recall--the last operations you were performing before the freeze.  That information is especially helpful.  Things like, were you adding an entry,  changing one, or not changing anything?  If you were changing one, was there anything unique about the entry?  We may not respond individually to each e-mail, but we are studying them.

And our thanks again to all the users who have sent us information.  Thank you!