Android auto sleep problem/bug

[jfitie]

What exactly does the auto sleep setting do on Android?

 

With this setting enabled (tried 30 minutes and 4 hours), I cannot get BTSync to work properly. It seems to sync fine at first, but after it's gone to sleep it doesn't seem to wake up anymore. Changes are not propagated to the Android device.

 

I see it connect in the Devices tab of BTSync on my laptop, but there is not data being transferred.

 

With auto sleep turned off everything works as expected.

 

[JimmyTheSaint]

Auto sleep generally works as expected for me, but sometimes I have the same problem. I need to spend more time looking for patterns for when it works and when it doesn't because it's hard to pinpoint just when it quit syncing. I have the app set to check for activity every 15 minutes. Actually, maybe I shouldn't say "quit sync," but rather that some stuff goes without syncing for more than an hour. It's possible that it would eventually sync, but when I detect the discrepancy I always need it to sync immediately, so I foreground the app to fix things. A couple of things I suspect:

 

1) when you change networks, you sometimes lose sync. I think I've lost sync going from my 3G data plan back to my home LAN's Wifi, and possibly other Wifi. I've turned off WiFi completely (unlimited data plan) to see over the next few weeks if I ever lose sync. But other times, I've also lost sync without changing networks.

 

2) if you open a document from within the BitTorrent Sync app instead of directly from its associated app, I think that will guarantee maintaining sync because you un-sleep BitTorrent Sync each time you do that. That solution is unworkable in the long run unless they turn the app into a full-featured, fully customizable file explorer that works as extraordinarily well as my current favorite, Solid Explorer.

[MikeCerm]

I have experienced the same problem. Sometimes auto-sleep works fine, other times I need to manually relaunch the Sync app, which causes it to immediately reconnect and start downloading changes that should have already synced. Definitely a bug, but it's better than the old bug where, before they added the auto-sleep feature, my battery would be dead in four hours.

 

There is a new build in the Play Store today. I just installed it and haven't had enough time to determine if this issue is among the bugs that were fixed in the new build.

[btsyncid]

I am definetly experiencing this problem. It works fine whenever I open the app mysel, otherwise it just keeps sleeping.

I am using Nexus 4 and, I think, I sometimes close all apps using multitasking button in bottom-right corner. Can that be the reason?

[JimmyTheSaint]

I sometimes close all apps using multitasking button in bottom-right corner. Can that be the reason?

If you kill the app, it will definitely stop syncing. You can always select the "Use Notification" option to keep the app's icon visible in the status bar as a reminder of the its status.

[JimmyTheSaint]

1.3.21.0 still has the same problem: Auto Sleep stops syncing relatively soon. As far as I can tell, within a few hours at most, my phone will stop syncing changes made by other clients. Many hours later, I can see that the phone's version is that many hours behind what's been synced on all the non-Android peers.

 

The reverse doesn't seem to be true: when I make a change on the phone via a third party app, BitTorrent Sync seems to notice within the Auto Sleep period. But I haven't systematically taken notes on the behavior. I just know that it stops syncing within a few sleep periods. It's possible that it syncs again much (8 or more hours) later.

 

In fact, I haven't yet seen anyone on the forums state definitively that Auto Sleep worked with a reasonable degree of consistency for them.

[RomanZ]

@JimmyTheSaint

 

Thanks for reporting. We'll try to reproduce it in our lab with the latest version.