Is it me or is icloud much slower than nearby sync
Tim, can you be more quantitative than “much slower”?
How fast is your Internet service up and down? Mine is 50 Mbps both up and down, which is relevant for iCloud sync. But nearby sync only depends on the Wi-Fi links inside your house. My router connects to my iMac at 1300 Mbps, more than 20x my external network connection. And iCloud sync involves additional processing outside your house, as well.
Wouldn’t you expect nearby sync to be faster?
— Mike
My internet service is the same street as yours
Yes, iCloud would definitely be much slower than Nearby sync.
Two reasons:
1. iCloud goes over the Internet and Nearby sync does not.
2. Nearby sync is a native sync implementation built-in to the database engine I’m using (Couchbase Lite). iCloud sync was a bolt-on that was originally written as an open-source framework called BTCloudKitSync. Then, since I didn’t have much experience with CloudKit syncing, I hired someone to help me get it to work with Tap Forms. Plus I worked on it myself. I’ve got an update in the wings which will hopefully make it work a bit more quickly now too. But it is also at the mercy of Apple’s CloudKit servers. Often they will send Tap Forms a notice saying that their servers are too busy and it should wait 16 seconds (or whatever time it says) and try the request again. So Tap Forms has to sit there waiting before it’s allowed to try again.
The current implementation will also establish a new connection to the server for every image that needs to be downloaded. In the next update, that requirement is eliminated and Tap Forms will issue a request to fetch 200 items at a time. An item could be an image, a file attachment, a drawing, an audio recording, or a record itself. But it will do that in batches of 200 and won’t make a separate request after that again to fetch the attachments.
But Nearby (and Cloudant and Apache CouchDB) will still be fastest.
Thanks,
Brendan
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