phpFox iOS App: Photos upload takes between 30sec and 1 min to upload

[jwpwhite]

What's happened?

Uploading photos in the app takes between 30sec and 1min even on a 20mb fibre line. The same photo takes about 3sec to upload on the Facebook iOS app. The issue will be even worse if multiple images are uploaded. In my opinion, this is a critical issue as most users will probably think the app has hung and close the app rather than wait for 30sec to a minute...

Steps to reproduce:

1. Enter the phpFox iOS app and upload a photo taken with the iPhone. You will see that it takes between 30sec and 1min to upload even on a very fast internet connection.
2. Enter the Facebook iOS app and upload the same photo taken with the iPhone. You will see that it take about 3sec to upload on the same internet connection.
3. Run a Speed Test to check you upload speed. Mine was between 15mbps and 20mbps

What's expected?

I would expect the iOS app to upload a photo in under 10sec on a very fast internet connection. From what I can see, the iOS phpFox app is trying to upload the full resolution image, which then has to be scaled by the server before it is shown. The Facebook is resizing the image before it is upload, saving considerable upload time and possible server processing too.

Browsers and Devices tested

iPhone 7 running iOS 12.4.1

Server information

Amazon Linux, php 7.2

phpFox version

phpFox 4.7.7

Screenshots

[harrison05]

Hi @jwpwhite ,

Upload duration not only based on internet speed but also your server speed, we test with image > 20Mb on our site and it just takes from 10 ~ 15 secs to upload.

[jwpwhite]

Hi @harrison05
I have tested this a few times on the phpFox server and my server hosted on AWS and at no stage have I bee even close to upload one image in 10 to 15sec. I would be really interested to see what upload performance other users are experiencing. Either way, I still think that 5X slower performance (15 sec) is still a big enough issue that phpFox should consider investigating it further.
Thanks
John

[jwpwhite]

Hi @harrison05
I have discovered the secret behind the incredibly fast photo upload speeds on social platform such as Facebook and Instagram and I think that it is incredibly importnant that phpFox considers implementing this.
The first step in adding an image involved selecting the image that the user want to post. Rather than wait to upload the photo when they click the post button, Facebook and Instagram both start uploading the photo in the background immediately so that by the time the user has written some text and then clicked the post button, the photo has already been uploaded. So when a user clicks the post button, it is only really tiny text packets that are being sent to the server. This has a considerable impact on speed and this a users experience.
Let me know your thoughts.

Kind regards
John

[spirogg]

@jwpwhite how's performance now way better with latest update ?

@harrison05 have phpfox considered this for all uploads not just photos that @jwpwhite mentioned, about getting the upload started right away. even for videos? we can start the upload and have them fill in the text fields as the video are being uploaded....

@jwpwhite great homework this is really important for performance and is key to a Money making website... all the bells and whistles can be added but if performance is not top priority then forget the bell and whistles cause you will never have successful website

I sure hope the new v5 will be awesome and way faster platform, including the IOS and Android apps

[jwpwhite]

@spirogg not seeing any major improvements yet so not sure this has been implemented...
@harrison05 any updates on your side?

[tonyphpfox]

Hi @jwpwhite @spirogg,
In next major update (v1.8.0), we will prioritize performance to improve user experience. Some improvements regarding post status, upload photos and videos will be included in that version.

Regards.