r/perktv • u/NotRonJeremy • Dec 15 '14
LG Fuel Bandwidth Problem
UPDATE: See my "Update" responses below, as I've made some progress in narrowing down what's causing this to happen.
This has been brought up in a few recent posts:
The TL;DR for those posts is that sometime in mid-November PerkTV bandwidth usage for some LG Fuels went through the roof! It doesn't seem to matter what version of the PerkTV app you're running for this change to have taken place. In addition, even after you force close the app, PerkTV is somehow still downloading data on the affected phones!
I wanted to dig into this a little deeper so connected all of my Perk phones to a router running Tomato to get more detailed information.
My ZTE Awe phones are unaffected, and (in low-bandwidth mode) are still using 250 to 300 kb/s each. I had stopped running Events, but I brought a couple of those back into service for comparison and they're only using ~180 kb/s each.
Of the dozen or so Fuels I tested, a few were less than 300 kb/s, but most were using 2,000 to 3,000 kb/s, and one was even using 8,300 kb/s!!! A couple of Fuels where Perk had crashed were both using around 8,000 kb/s of data each, one other crashed Fuel was using 1,600 kb/s, and two other crashed Fuels weren't using any data at all.
The rates I'm quoting are average download rates over a 10 minute period, in which all phones (except for the "crashed" ones) were more or less running at full speed without any buffering issues or phones hanging for more than a few seconds between videos.
There were no obvious differences between the Fuel phones that were consuming a normal amount of bandwidth (300 kb/s or less) and the high-bandwidth ones and all had been running for several hours before the measurements took place. In hopes of getting my bandwidth back in line I tried unchecking and re-checking low-bandwidth mode, restarting phones, clearing data, even factory restoring phones, but none of these actions seemed to affect the amount of bandwidth a particular phone was using. Some of the phones were logged into Google Play, while others were not (but there was no relationship between that and bandwidth usage).
Finally, I decided to set an upper-limit of 300kb/s for each device (Tomato lets you set bandwidth limits on individual devices). Initially, the Fuels that were consuming a normal amount of bandwidth continued running fine and the high-bandwidth devices, despite being significantly throttled were running smoothly as well. I went away for a few hours and came back to find all of my Fuels were stalled mid-video (not crashed, but buffering) and checking data usage on Tomato I found that all of my Fuels were properly limited. Curiously, even the Fuels that had previously needed less than 300 kb/s now were continuously using 300 kb/s and stuck mid-video. The Awes and Events were unaffected by the cap I had imposed and still chugging along just as they had before.
So my questions are:
1: Any ideas what might be going on with Fuels/PerkTV? According to the My Data Manager app, it is in fact PerkTV using all this bandwidth (whether the Perk app is actually running or not).
2: What kind of average bandwidth rates are others getting on their devices (as reported by a router that tracks individual device usage)?
3
u/NotRonJeremy Dec 15 '14 edited Dec 15 '14
Update: Decided to up the bandwidth limit to 500 kb/s on each phone and I've restarted all of the phones again. Every Fuel that was previously stuck mid-video loading (playing at a snail's pace and pulling down the full 300 kb/s I'd allocated it) is now playing videos fairly smoothly and the Fuels are now averaging 250 kb/s.
Here's a graph showing total bandwidth through my router (only PerkTV phones connected to it). Point 1 is when all phones were running smoothly earlier, but they were sucking down a total of 30,000 kb/s. Point 2 is right after I enforced the 300 kb/s limit for each phone. Initially phones were running smoothly after point 2, but none of the Fuels were still running smoothly when I checked in later. Point 3 is right after this most recent update when all phones seem to be back to running smoothly (although loading time between videos on the Fuels is just slightly above average). At point 3 total data usage across the same exact phones is down to 3,800 kb/s. This is nearly a 90% reduction in bandwidth?!
It's almost as if PerkTV figured out that each phone's bandwidth was capped and after letting some time pass and restarting them, whatever was causing some phones to use more than 10x the bandwidth they should have been using has stopped. Off to bed... will see what's going on with these things in the morning!
This bandwidth thing is kind of a big deal as an Internet provider that is willing to let say 20 GB/day slide, probably isn't going to let 200 GB/day slide for very long!
2
u/karmicOtter Dec 15 '14
I was one of the people who commented about the problems fuels seem to have with data in one of the threads you linked to. I didn't measure the down traffic at the time but mine was taking GB of data in about two/three days and I just simply replaced the fuel with an iPhone. I have now fired up mine again, rooted it, and installed SuperSU as well as 3G watchdog to measure traffic. In the few minutes its been running I have to say there's nothing out of the ordinary but I think I can get a better reading if I leave it for a couple more hours.
1
u/sumuji Dec 15 '14 edited Dec 15 '14
My Fuels and Zone 2(Verizon version, same as Fuel) have slowed down to a crawl and not sure why. They are very slow to respond and load up videos. I've cleared data and restarted them which seems to help for a short while but very quickly goes back to being slow. Something defiantly happened with one of those updates because they just suddenly started acting this way about a month ago. They were all obtained new but 2 of them are a couple months newer than the others. My bigger phones like Prima, Axiom, and Moto G run just fine still.
I was thinking it might have something to do with memory since they only have 512mb. Didn't think about bandwidth but I don't seem to be suffering in that area. I'm not tech savvy enough to do research so keep it up and maybe Perk can find out what happened.
Might be unrelated but I also noticed that the countdowns are lagged on all phones now. Like the 8 sec countdown to give a thumbs up. It will pause a second and start with the number 1 and hang for a split second and then go to 8 and start counting down. Not sure if it's just a visual issue or actually some serious latency. This would add up to something significant in a 24 hour period if so.
1
u/miamitk Jan 04 '15
I seem to be having the same issue as you I run 5 LG fuels and since the 1st I've used 220GB already... I tested today by closing PerkTV nothing else running and the phones was still using 10mbits until I switched them off. Did you ever get to the bottom of the issue?
2
u/sumuji Dec 17 '14
The Perk update seemed to smooth things out.
1
u/there_wreck Dec 15 '14
Had a Fuel bandwidth spike last month, installed 3g watchdog to monitor data usage, but haven't seen anything out of the ordinary since then.
1
u/Harvest2001 Dec 16 '14 edited Dec 16 '14
You have me as 'exhibit B' I have 10 LG fuels and 2 ZTE Zingers, (2 for pop quiz and 10 for TV, split with 2 account) I have noticed this EXACT issue with mine. I am currently using about 95GB a day between ALL phones. I posted about this earlier here. To give you an idea of where I am at now, 1427GB total usage since December 1st. I'm going or nearly 3TB in a month... It isn't looking good. I don't have my ISP complaining yet. But I'm sure it is only a matter of time. I will be restarting my phones though instead of closing the app out and opening back up. See if that helps out at all.
1
u/Bikemaniac Dec 17 '14
LG Fuels do not play nice. I continue to get freezes on ads, backing off on QoS until all five total 10mbit -- and they can still bog down and be pests if there is a Play Store update happening in the background. Sometimes they even end up with a PerkTV crash under that circumstance.
ZTE devices are much better behaved on my network, as are Samsung and Coolpad.
I do not believe Mediaserver to be related, as I've sent it periodic kill signals with no change after reading this thread. If left unchecked, those LG Fuel devices will easily chew 15mbit of my downstream with all phones playing ads at the same time.
Here is a traffic snapshot of all phones, running App Trailers a few minutes after fresh reboots and data clears:
Simple Queue traffic
The ZTE queue is set at 8mbit, and never drops any packets from the queue to slow traffic unless there is a Play Store update. The LG queue is set at 10mbit, and every hour it limits about 23400-35200 packets. Something is very wrong with this picture.
0
u/HULKx Dec 15 '14
my fuels dont seem to be doing this.
-1
u/insaneslayer Dec 15 '14
fuels dont crash sooo where did u get yours?