[BUG] Messages stuck on sending

[shani8538]

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Is there an existing issue for this?

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Current Behavior

After using the Session IOS for a short while, if I send a message to any of my contacts it gets stuck on 'Sending'. This won't change unless I swipe off the app and clear it from my recent apps. Upon restarting the app the message will change from 'Sending' to 'Sent'.
Just switching apps won't resolve the issue.

Expected Behavior

Messages should change from 'Sending' to 'Sent' instantly.

Steps To Reproduce

No response

iOS Version

17.5.1

Session Version

2.6.0

Anything else?

No response

[obatard]

Hello.

I have the same problem, since session 2.6.0 and iOs 17.5, especially iOS 17.5. The ios app disconnects from the nodes when the app enters in the background and doesn't automatically connects again. I have to force the app to quit and open it again to reconnect to the nodes and the message is sent. Here are some logs.

It often happens while in cellular network, no problem on wifi.

com.loki-project.loki-messenger 2024-05-21--15-07-45-785.log

[royborgen]

I can confirm this one. Seeing the same issue. App needs to close and then reopen. Also seen this on the Ubuntu snap desktop app

[mpretty-cyro]

Thanks for reporting this issue, the 2.6.0 release has actually only been rolled out to ~5% of users at the moment (lucky all of you! 😅) - we are currently working on some fixes for a few issues for the updated networking approach (see oxen-io/session-ios#976), there are a couple of stubborn crashes we are working on at the moment which are taking priority so I don't have a good timeline on when it might come out but any device logs you can share could help debug this issue

I have the same problem, since session 2.6.0 and iOs 17.5, especially iOS 17.5. The ios app disconnects from the nodes when the app enters in the background and doesn't automatically connects again. I have to force the app to quit and open it again to reconnect to the nodes and the message is sent. Here are some logs.

It often happens while in cellular network, no problem on wifi.

@obatard Thanks for sending through the logs and the info about the behaviour you are experiencing - this isn't actually all that obvious from the logs you have shared (there is no obvious issue in them except for a single request timeout) but luckily we've had someone internally who seems to be experiencing the same issue so we have additional logs we can compare

In this case what seems to be happening is:

• App is sent to the background
• We stop any in-progress connections (to prevent crashes due to the OS randomly killing stuff in the background)
• The networking system sees that the connections have shut down and incorrectly tries to rebuild the connection before the app is "officially" in the background
• If you open the app again before the OS has killed the app (which may never happen - Apple don't provide specifics about this behaviour) then this "rebuilt" connection is considered valid (even though it actually isn't) and requests seem to fail

Once I've sorted out these stubborn crashes this one is next on the list and is planned to be included in oxen-io/session-ios#976

[mpretty-cyro]

Tracking this on Jira as: SES-1925

[mpretty-cyro]

Version 2.6.1 has now started the phased rollout, please let me know if any of you are still experiencing this issue after updating

[obatard]

Version 2.6.1 has now started the phased rollout, please let me know if any of you are still experiencing this issue after updating

The problems are not fixed, there's no improvement, especially when we switch to the cellular network, connection to the nodes is lost and can't be established unless we kill the app and start the app again. This is an annoying bug because the messages are not sent. Here are some logs, before and after that I kill the app so the messages is sent.
com.loki-project.loki-messenger 2024-06-12--17-18-34-250.log
com.loki-project.loki-messenger 2024-06-12--17-18-34-250 2.log

[mpretty-cyro]

Hey @obatard, thanks for sharing these logs they were really helpful - I've opened a draft PR (#981) to track the fixes for the 2.6.1 issues

It looks like the notification extension might be suspending the network if you receive a push notification while the main app is running so I've reworked things to remove the networking logic from the notification extension (it looks like it never really ran long enough for it to be useful anyway)

If this is the cause of your issue, while it's not ideal, you might be able to get around it by disabling Fast Mode while the app is open - otherwise we'll start testing the fixes linked and can hopefully get another update out soon (I haven't seen any crashes coming through so far so this one will hopefully be faster than the last one)

[obatard]

Hey @obatard, thanks for sharing these logs they were really helpful - I've opened a draft PR (#981) to track the fixes for the 2.6.1 issues

It looks like the notification extension might be suspending the network if you receive a push notification while the main app is running so I've reworked things to remove the networking logic from the notification extension (it looks like it never really ran long enough for it to be useful anyway)

If this is the cause of your issue, while it's not ideal, you might be able to get around it by disabling Fast Mode while the app is open - otherwise we'll start testing the fixes linked and can hopefully get another update out soon (I haven't seen any crashes coming through so far so this one will hopefully be faster than the last one)

What do you mean by "Fast mode" low energy, airplane mode, notifications? It sounds like a great workaround while waiting fot the fix but I can't see how to do that in iOS 17. Anyway I'll try to disable notifications and see if that works as a workaround.

I just tried to disable all push notifications exception session app's and it worked all day, messages are sent when there's no other notifications. Sounds like it's really a notification issue.

Thank you.

[mpretty-cyro]

@obatard We've just started the rollout of 2.6.2 which aims to fix this notification-specific issue and resolves a couple of other edge-cases, if you get the chance can you please let me know how you go with that one?

There is still one other odd case that we know of which can cause issues, but it's a bit more complicated (and should be rarer) so it'll have to be in another release

What do you mean by "Fast mode" low energy, airplane mode, notifications? It sounds like a great workaround while waiting fot the fix but I can't see how to do that in iOS 17. Anyway I'll try to disable notifications and see if that works as a workaround.

In Session notifications can either be in "Fast Mode" (using push notifications) or "Slow Mode" (relying solely on Background Fetching) - you can disable Fast Mode by turning the switch off within the Session app settings at Settings -> Notifications -> Use Fast Mode

[obatard]

@obatard We've just started the rollout of 2.6.2 which aims to fix this notification-specific issue and resolves a couple of other edge-cases, if you get the chance can you please let me know how you go with that one?

There is still one other odd case that we know of which can cause issues, but it's a bit more complicated (and should be rarer) so it'll have to be in another release

It's actually worse than before the update. The messages are not sent when we switch from wifi to cellular and then randomly. Anyway it works well when we kill the app and disable all the notifications.

@obatard We've just started the rollout of 2.6.2 which aims to fix this notification-specific issue and resolves a couple of other edge-cases, if you get the chance can you please let me know how you go with that one?

There is still one other odd case that we know of which can cause issues, but it's a bit more complicated (and should be rarer) so it'll have to be in another release

What do you mean by "Fast mode" low energy, airplane mode, notifications? It sounds like a great workaround while waiting fot the fix but I can't see how to do that in iOS 17. Anyway I'll try to disable notifications and see if that works as a workaround.

In Session notifications can either be in "Fast Mode" (using push notifications) or "Slow Mode" (relying solely on Background Fetching) - you can disable Fast Mode by turning the switch off within the Session app settings at Settings -> Notifications -> Use Fast Mode

I just disabled the fast mode, I'll run some test and tell you.

[obatard]

I just disabled the fast mode, I'll run some test and tell you.

I ran some tests, no improvement whatsoever, notifications don't work and messages are not sent. I'll try to send some useful logs later. But to recap:

• Messages are not sent when the phone connection switches from Wifi to cellular. Killing the app solves the problem.
• When push notifications from other apps are present, we can't send messages, messages stay in the "sending" status.

So, at the moment the bugs are not fixed, there are some workarounds though.

[obatard]

Here are some additional logs, when the bug happens without push nitification involved.
com.loki-project.loki-messenger 2024-06-26--09-01-55-992.log
com.loki-project.loki-messenger 2024-06-26--09-01-55-992 2.log

com.loki-project.loki-messenger 2024-06-27--11-56-44-191.log
com.loki-project.loki-messenger 2024-06-27--11-56-44-191 2.log