THE APPS: Two Cocos2d universal iOS games with a large customer base.
THE PROBLEM: Several months back (in 2011) reports started coming in, sounds would randomly cut out, only some of the sounds would play in the app, others wouldn’t. This problem can ONLY be fixed by a device reboot.
IMPORTANT NOTES & DETAILS:
The SAME code and SAME sound files played fine for over a year with
NO bug reports of this sort. I wish I could pinpoint a date, but I
believe the problem started with an iOS update.
The bug is incredibly hard to reproduce. I have personally seen it
once, but I have had no luck causing it again. Yet we get 1-2
support emails a day with the same issue, some of which come in the
form a bad reviews. If I had to pull a number out of the air, I’d
guess we’re looking at a 1 in 1000 incidence. It seems maybe more
common on the iPad, but I’m not sure.
Restarting the device is the ONLY way to fix the problem.
Restarting the app does nothing, deleting the app and reinstalling
does nothing, has to be a power down and turn back on.
A few weeks ago in an attempt to blindly fix I dumped the Cocos2d
Sound engine and switched one of the apps over to ObjectAL (another
openAL based sound engine), hoping it might have fixed the problem.
It did not, same issue is occurring. As you'd note, both of these
are just interfaces for OpenAL.
The sound files themselves were converted from wavs to cafs using
Apple’s recommend method (
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#codinghowtos/AudioAndVideo/_index.html
), although we also used the -c 1 flag to make them single channel.
Just to be clear, the bug has nothing to do with the usual sound
issues (mute switch, volume). A portion of the sounds continue
playing fine, but they will never all play again until the device is
powered down and restarted.
If anyone has any ideas I’d all, I’d be very grateful for the help. I’m at wits end here trying to fix a persistent bug I can’t recreate and that appears to be caused by something outside my control.
I've had similar problems with OpenAL, as the commenters stated. We had spurious problems on different hardware and on different OS releases. Really, it was nearly impossible to reproduce. The only reason we even found out about the problem was the significant percentage of users who experienced crashes or other severe audio problems. We tried for months trying to make it work, but in the end the stability problems we experienced just weren't manageable. We ended up going with another library and took OpenAL completely out of the picture. I certainly would not recommend it for new projects.
Related
I dont know where to ask this, but im just ask it here and if you know where im supposed to ask this just let me know.
So a couple days ago when im watching youtube on my pc, a portion of the video always being looping for some reason without me doing anything. The only way to make it stop was to reload the page. Does anyone have the same problem? and how do i disable this?
Heres a pic of what it looks like
Have you tried:
Closing out the YouTube application and restarting it?
Tried opening YouTube with a different browser?
Updating your computer OS & main browser to the latest version?
Signed in & out of YouTube?
Try those and see if those work. This is based on my experience in my previous job as an IT Help Desk Specialist. A software feature failed to work, but a simple restart of the browser/computer fixed the issue. In addition, general maintenance usually fixes the issue: updates, security scans, rebooting, deleting unused
files/cache, etc.
Let me know how it goes.
I have an app that adds a lot of UIClasses to many different Views. Views get removed and get added again. But then after some time working with the app, the app starts to slow down. Reloading everything, including the Viewcontroller, doesn't help.
The problem is, that i don't know what could slow down the app. The Memory Usage of the app doesn't go up and the CPU usage doesn't go up aswell. It just seems that the App does everything slower. Views take longer to get added to the view and so on.
Is there anything that i could check what could cause the app to slow down over time? I know that this question is very broad, but maybe someone of you can show me the direction to look at. I`m out of ideas.
It's hard to answer a question like this in the abstract.
I suggest using the Instruments tool and running a time profile. That lets you see where your app is spending most of it's time. You should be able to run the app for a period of time and see the culprit start to take more and more time as you run the app.
I have been developing an iOS app that utilizes the CloudKit feature available for Apple Developers. I've found it to be a wonderful resource, especially since the very day I started designing my backend, the service I was intending to use (Parse) announced it was shutting down. It's very appealing due to it's small learning curve, but I'm starting to notice some annoying little issues here and there so I'm seeking out some experts for advice and help. I posted another CloudKit question a couple days ago, which is still occurring: CloudKit Delete Self Option Not Working. But I want to limit this to a different issue that may be related.
Problem ~ Ever since I started using CloudKit I have noticed that whenever I manually try to edit (delete an entry, remove or add part of a list, even add a DeleteSelf option to a CKReference after creation), and then try to save the change, I get an error message and cannot proceed. Here is a screenshot of the error window that appears:
It's frustrating because anytime I want to manipulate a record to perform some sort of test, I either have to go do it through my app, or just delete the record entirely and create a new one (that I am able to do without issue). I have been just working around this issue for over a month now because it wasn't fatal to my progress. However, I am starting to think that this could be related to my other CloudKit issues, and maybe if I could get some advice on how to fix it I could also solve my other problems. I have file numerous bug reports with Apple, but haven't received a response or seen any changes.
I'd also like to mention that for a very long time now (at least a few days), I've noticed down in the bottom left hand corner of my Dashboard that it is consistently saying that it's "Reindexing Development Data". I remember at first that wasn't an issue, I would get that notification after making a change but it'd go away after the operation is complete. Now it seems to be stuck somewhere inside the process. And this is a chronic issue, it's saying this all the time, even right when I log into my dashboard.
Here is what I'm talking about:
As time goes on I find more small issues with CloudKit, I'm concerned that once I go into production more problems could start manifesting and then I could have a serious issue. I'd love to stick with CloudKit and avoid the learning curve of a different service like Amazon Web Services, but I also don't want to set myself up for failure.
Can anyone help me with this issue, or has anyone else experienced it on a regular basis? Thanks for the advice and help!
Pierce,
I found myself in a similar situation; the issue seemed to be linked to Assets; I had an Asset in my record definition. I and several other I noted reported the re-indexing issue on the apple support website and after about a month it eventually disappeared.
Have you tried resting your database schema completely, snapshot the definition; since you zap it completely and than reset, see inset.
Ultimately I simply created a new project, linked it to cloud kit and use the new container in my original app.
I have a website written in ASP.NET MVC (Razor). Recently, a few days ago the images on the website started swapping all over the place. When refreshing the site, it might just hang for quite some time or load all images correctly. So I plugged my iPhone to my Mac and used the web inspector to see whats going on. I found out that at the time of load the browser hangs on certain files. These files are either images or js libraries. The images are very small. Less then 10kb so it is not the size of the image.
This issue only happens on iPhones. I checked on several iPhones.
I have tried multiple Android devices, Mac and Windows computers and they all load fast and every image is in the right place - no issues.
I researched a bit and found out some interesting references to HTTP Pipelining. But if that was is the case, why would these issues start now?
I do not know what to thing anymore.
What am I trying to understand is why would that only happen on the iPhone?
Thank you,
Any clue would be appreciated.
I had the same issue. After months of breaking my head I decided to implement lazy load on all images. After that, swapping never occurred.
Page hanging could happen because of multiple reasons. I would definitely check the code again and in particular look for the way you handled unmanaged resources. More on unmanaged resources
Since moving to iOS 8.3, I'm encountering this error where the main thread will get stuck in this call. A few other threads are also stuck in that call. There is none of my code in any thread that leads to this call, so I'm stumped as to why this is happening. It happens randomly, sometimes, when tapping a button bar item, sometimes while redrawing charts (using ShinobiCharts), etc.
Here is the stack trace from Xcode:
Anybody has any clue as to why this is happening and how to fix it? It's very annoying because when I get stuck there, I have to relaunch the app. Note that this is happening in the simulator so far. I'm in the early stage of developing this app and spend most of my time in the simulator. I haven't seen the error happening yet on a real device but, again, I haven't run the app that often on the device.
Knock on wood, but I think I figured it out (at least in my instance).
What led to the solution was a search for syscall_thread_switch, which led me to this answer here:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/30333203/978509
Which, if you look at the backtrace I linked (https://gist.github.com/Shalmezad/65ff89d20aa7e0a9d094), every syscall_thread_switch is preceded by OSSpinLockLockSlow, which the answer notes looks like Livelock, but due to the low CPU usage, is more evident of a deadlock.
Going through my code, I found that for every background task, I created a new dispatch_queue_t each time. I since redid how that works to use the same queue, which seems to have fixed the issue.
Without further information from nemesis (mainly some code snippets showing how he's setting up background tasks), I cannot answer their specific question, however this should point people in the right direction for fixing the issue.