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Sync speed

Fredderic
over 4 years ago

Hi,

sync speed is a very mixed bag for me. A rough guess for me is:

  • 5% of my runs will upload very fast (the instant I am home, I am still taking off my shoes)
  • 65% of my runs will upload reasonably fast, say within 3-5 minutes of arriving home
  • 30% of my runs, will take even longer than 5 minutes to upload, making me grab my phone and try to initiate a sync via garmin connect, waiting annother 5 mins etc. - these are often the really long activites, where I assume there is lots of data to transfer.

I have WiFi and Bluetooth enabled - when I get home that should mean the watch will (eventually) find both my phone and my WiFi, which is probably the most common scenario out there (at least for people that took the time to add their home WiFi to the watch).

Since I do have WiFi enabled I would expect uploads to be almost instantanous, as they are in rare cases (the 5%). My guess is that the watch finds the phone before it finds the WiFi, and then doesn't use the WiFi, but defaults to Bluetooth - and that is not the fastest. I know that if I go through the watch menu to trigger a WiFi sync, it will say a sync is already in progress [via bluetooth?]. A different theory is that the watch doesn't check for WiFi very often, e.g. if I end my activity infront of my home it might check once, but not find WiFi out there, then not try again a few minutes later when I have walked inside.

My suggestion: To make fast uploads more consistent it would be great if the watch would prioritize WiFi when available. Keep searching for the WiFi even if there is a phone around, and use it once found! I could even imagine trying both avenues (uploading the activity through bluetooth and WiFi simultanously) and making sure on the backend that some kind of duplicate detection will discard the slower one.

One thing I have considered but not tested yet is to disable bluetooth on my phone (prior to going out for the run), and checking how fast syncs are when there is no phone. Will try this and post about it.

Edit:  It seems to be possible to force a WiFi Sync by turning off the phones blue-tooth capabilities before hitting "Save" on the activity. A crude workaround, but definetly has improved my sync times by a lot. Garmin, can you patch it so the watch switched to WiFi once it becomes available provided bluetooth sync did not complete yet?

Edit2: Maybe an easier method is to disable the bluetooth connection to the phone via the watch menu. So far having great success by doing:

  1. At end of run, stop the run, but do not save yet
  2. Long press top left (light) button to enter the circular icon menu
  3. Find phone connection icon and hit that - phone connection will turn off
  4. Go "back" to return to your save activity screen, hit save
  5. Optional: If you do not have automatic sync via WiFi enabled or are not in WiFi range at this point, you can revisit the circular icon menu and request a sync
  6. Once you get the message that sync was complete, which only takes a few seconds for me, go back to the circular icon menu and re-enable the phone connection. Keeping it off permanently is probably not a good idea for most people as it is used for many features.

Edit3: Sadly, WiFi Sync does not seem to work on large workouts. Large seems to be 4h+ activities for me (and I have 1s recording of points enabled). We are talking slightly above 1MB file size here [of the uncompressed .fit], should be an absolute joke, but I think it is the size that is the problem (maybe the barrier is exactly 1mb?)

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to Fredderic

    That’ll do it I guess. My 4+ hour runs are much smaller even with 1s recording. But I don’t have Stryde throwing extra data in, just a chest strap.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    Thanks for this.  I did an experiment after reading this.  I have had HUGE issues with this for last couple months on my 935 and 945 (and even my MARQ).  They are all setup on app and on my Wi Fi.  For me, Its seems like when bluetooth is on on the phone and wi fi is on, it creates some kinda of race condition or conflict.  Uploads would take hours and if I try to sync in app on phone it spins and stops and never finishes.  Workout duration does not matter much at all. Happens for 30 minute runs and 5 hour rides.

    So, tonight, based on your post I turn off bluetooth on my Phone right before I saved my workout.  Workout was sync'd before I got my running shoes off.  

    Tomorrow I will test turning off Wi Fi on my watch and seeing if it sync's OK with just my phone.  Sure, Bluetooth will be slower than Wi Fi but that should be seconds or minutes and certainly not hours.  Seems like an issue when both are on but I don't know for sure.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to plinck
    plinck said:
    So, tonight, based on your post I turn off bluetooth on my Phone right before I saved my workout.  Workout was sync'd before I got my running shoes off.  

    So how did it sync?  I'm assuming you were at home and in range of your WiFi network when you did this, and it synced over Wifi?

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to badbri

    Yes.  It sync’d over wi fi

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    I too have been having a devil of a time with this issue for a long time now. 

    Sometimes my watch goes through phases where syncs are FAST and I get that pleasant little notification on the watch face that it has already synced while I am doing my stretches/cooldown routine in range of my truck (where my phone is).

    But USUALLY and especially lately, it takes hours and hours for a little 30-90min run to sync over (unless I take action as described below).

    Like others, I can "force" the sync if I turn off the connection to the phone and I then connect to wifi manually.  Obviously this doesn't work if I am not in range of my home network and in those cases it still takes many hours for a simple run to push over from the watch.

    Lately, to compound this, I am getting that awful little red exclamation point next to my watch in Garmin Connect Mobile.  I personally think the issue is in Connect Mobile app as it just acts really flaky with syncs lately.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to badbri

    same, has anyone contacted support about this yet?

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to renschler

    same on what? The upload problem with 1mb+ files? The fact that once a phone connection is established it will never try wifi? Or something else?

    For the 1mb wifi upload, I sure hope they are aware and fixing it, as that is a clear bug. With regards to bluetooth vs wifi, it might be more tricky, depending on how the hardware works: Not sure if it is possible to connect via WiFi while the bluetooth module is active, hardware wise - if it is not possible it would be cumbersome to have to interrupt a perfectly functioning [but slower] bluetooth sync just to check for WiFi networks, especially for scenarios where there is no WiFi around, it would just slow down the bluetooth sync even more!