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Sync after sleep: Internet connection offline Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
I am really loving OmniFocus, but there's a small hiccup in the OS X version that's becoming bothersome.

Whenever I wake my Mac from sleep, which is at least twice a day, the sync will not initiate because OmniFocus continues to report that "The Internet connection is offline." Of course it's not. I guess the sync just fails because the Internet connection isn't restored immediately.

The problem is I have to sync manually every time.

Am I the only user experiencing this? Is there a fix?

Any help is much appreciated. Thanks Omni for your great work!
 
No, this is a problem I see all the time. It's frustrating.

However it's not an unknown problem; there are multiple threads in the forums that discuss it. Brian says it's "not as simple to solve as it may seem" but in reality OmniFocus is the only application I have that acts so badly; it really should be more aware of changes in network state and behave accordingly. Perhaps because OmniFocus supports 4 OS X versions (all the way back to 10.4) they have some a hard time with this, but I'd be all for dropping 10.4 and 10.5 support immediately and fixing this.

But that's just my opinion which I've previously shared, so I digress :-D
 
I don't buy the premise that tracking the network state is too difficult with all the OS versions they support. They've got all the pieces they need already. They track the state of the last sync attempt (necessary to put up the ! annunciator in the sync button) and they have machinery for scheduling another sync attempt after a fixed interval of time. When it is time to sync, start a truncated binary exponential backoff with a slot time of a second or so and a ceiling of 4 or 5 attempts. Only set the error flag if you make it to the ceiling, or you get a hard error (password incorrect, for example).
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by whpalmer4 View Post
I don't buy the premise that tracking the network state is too difficult with all the OS versions they support. They've got all the pieces they need already. They track the state of the last sync attempt (necessary to put up the ! annunciator in the sync button) and they have machinery for scheduling another sync attempt after a fixed interval of time. When it is time to sync, start a truncated binary exponential backoff with a slot time of a second or so and a ceiling of 4 or 5 attempts. Only set the error flag if you make it to the ceiling, or you get a hard error (password incorrect, for example).
Well, I see this problem greater than 90% of the time I wake my laptop. I mean, it's EVERY TIME.

And the laptop has a working network connection within 10 seconds of waking, max (it's more like 5 seconds). So OF is hitting the "fail" state of the backoff within 5 seconds? Sounds like a pretty crappy implementation to me.

Note I don't have the same problems on my desktop, but IMO the performance on my laptop is frankly terrible. I'm not generally that critical of software but I really think the OF sync system, while workable, is not a good experience (it's slow with all the zip files; requires you to remember to sync all your client regularly, and it doesn't sync on wake properly).

I've contacted support on this 2 or 3 times over the past 3 years and "Yeah, we'll fix it" is the answer, but here we are 3 years later... still not fixed. Sure, if I start entering data in OF it will sync, or after an hour it may rectify itself, but that's like a freaking hour my data is out of sync if I _don't_ enter data in OF.
 
No, I'm not saying that OF works in the way I described — I'm saying that it could be made to work in the way that I described, which should be a great improvement over how it does. And one wouldn't have to do anything that the software doesn't already know how to do...
 
Thanks for the replies guys: glad I'm not the only one.

The thing is: I just don't get it. My MacBook Pro connects to the Internet very quickly (probably < 3s) and still, sync fails. And just like CatOne, I get this error EVERY SINGLE TIME. It's not sporadic at all: every time I open my computer, it crops up.

It ends up creating doubts about whether everything is in sync. To the point that, if I close my MacBook Pro, I often wonder whether OmniFocus had synced.

Last edited by b-dr; 2012-02-28 at 08:12 AM..
 
What I think happens now is that OF starts running when you open the laptop, notices that the clock is past the time when it is scheduled to do its next sync, and promptly goes and tries to do a sync. The network hasn't come up yet (OF probably gets scheduled within 1 second of the machine waking) and the effort fails. There does not appear to be any attempt to try again, just the regularly scheduled periodic sync, plus anything triggered by user action.

While I agree that this is annoying and should have been fixed long ago, tapping the sync button does give a pretty easy remedy! Even if you left your laptop awake, you're still going to have to force a sync if you want to make sure that every last change has been brought over before you start work, unless you've dialed the value of MaximumTimeBetweenSync down to a small number...
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by b-dr View Post
The thing is: I just don't get it. My MacBook Pro connects to the Internet very quickly (probably < 3s) and still, sync fails.
Like I said, time from waking from sleep until the first time OmniFocus gets a chance to run can be a very short time. If it was scheduled to sync while it was sleeping, it will try to sync immediately, and fail because either the MacBook hasn't connected to the network, or depending on your networking setup, your router hasn't connected to the outside world. The networking stack doesn't issue predictions on when it thinks the network will be back up, it just reports failure :-)
Quote:
And just like CatOne, I get this error EVERY SINGLE TIME. It's not sporadic at all: every time I open my computer, it crops up.
I would expect that in the same circumstances, you would get repeatable behavior.
Quote:
It ends up creating doubts about whether everything is in sync. To the point that, if I close my MacBook Po, I often wonder whether OmniFocus had synced.
By default, OmniFocus syncs 1 minute after you make any change, and hourly thereafter. (It is possible to change both of those values via the Terminal, but rarely necessary.) If it has been more than a minute, and you don't have the "!" in the middle of the Sync button indicating a failure, you've synced. If there's any doubt, click the sync button and wait until it stops turning.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by whpalmer4 View Post
What I think happens now is that OF starts running when you open the laptop, notices that the clock is past the time when it is scheduled to do its next sync, and promptly goes and tries to do a sync. The network hasn't come up yet (OF probably gets scheduled within 1 second of the machine waking) and the effort fails. There does not appear to be any attempt to try again, just the regularly scheduled periodic sync, plus anything triggered by user action.
Well, right. One try and fail seems pretty cruddy, especially if the try is before the network stack is up (which, again, is up in less than 10 seconds).

Quote:
While I agree that this is annoying and should have been fixed long ago, tapping the sync button does give a pretty easy remedy! Even if you left your laptop awake, you're still going to have to force a sync if you want to make sure that every last change has been brought over before you start work, unless you've dialed the value of MaximumTimeBetweenSync down to a small number...
It's an annoying remedy, though, _especially_ since when you force the sync you get a modal dialog box as well. The whole sync behavior of OmniFocus is a bit "in your face" in the dialog box, as well as the blocking dialog box on the iOS clients. Other more modern sync systems seem to do it in the background without blocking the whole application.
 
I agree with CatOne: the need for the user to intervene is annoying.

And here's the problem: I just opened my Mac and went to eat some dinner. I came back, 30 minutes later and still no sync.

In other words, I have to manually force the sync, which triggers the pop-up "Your Internet connection...", hit "Retry", and then, finally, everything is in sync. All the time. And the timeframe doesn't matter: it just won't sync automatically after waking up.

I agree that the remedy is simple, but it's not painless. (Sort of.) There's no reason for it to require user input.
 
 


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