A quick update on my earlier post… We have identified a few issues that we believe explain the majority of symptoms that some customers are experiencing. The root cause seems to be a change in 2.2.2 that moved the sync operation to the background for most apps.
An error in the code caused user databases to grow over time for apps that infrequently connected to the Tablo. The increased database size created several side effects that slowed operation of the Tablo. This error was not uncovered in testing as it took several months to grow the database to a size where symptoms were noticeable. Our test processes have been changed to ensure this does not happen again.
We have also identified a race condition that we believe explains the apparent infrequent loss of recordings.
We have also found a way to significantly speed up the retrieval of recordings on the Roku.
These fixes will be included a beta release we will begin testing today. Please note that a component of the fix is run during the nightly maintenance window and therefore you may not notice full performance improvements until the day following your upgrade.
We also investigated the playback issues reported on the new Roku 4. They included delays in starting playback, delay in resuming playback after FF/REW and pauses with the “Loading” message during playback. The investigation has so far revealed an issue that is causing packet loss which reduces the speed that the video is received by the Roku 4. If the speed drops below the rate of the video stream, then delays and buffering will occur.
On the Roku 4, we traced this to a specific sequence of events. If the Roku is connected to the network with WiFi and is then switched to a wired Ethernet connection without a subsequent power cycle, the Ethernet interface appears to be initialized in a bad state which causes the packet loss. The solution is to power cycle the Roku 4 once it has been connected and set up to run using the wired Ethernet connection. This corrected the problem with the Roku 4 we have available for testing but we would like other users with this hardware to attempt this fix and report back on their results.
We have been unable to reproduce this same ‘bad state’ and packet loss on earlier Roku platforms like Roku 3 and 2. We will continue to work to identify other potential sources of ‘loading please wait’ problems unrelated to poor home network performance.