Speed test in LC application

[Peter Bogdanoff]

Hi,

I’m sometimes having trouble with my application downloading audio and image files from a remote server when they are requested. I’m thinking of adding some diagnostic tools to the application to see what is going on and I would like to know if anyone has experience with this and can give me advice.

My application, “Music in the Air,” a music exploration/history program for music students is heavily dependent on audio and image files being downloaded from a remote server (currently Amazon AWS) while the user peruses the program. The user chooses a musical work to view and play and immediately the program downloads 2 to 100+ image files (gifs averaging 50 KB each) of the musical notation. When the user start the audio playing, the program loads the player with a remote audio file (10-50 MB). This library of audio and images is 2 GB+, so the need to store and serve it as needed.

However, users are reporting that possibly 10-15% of the time the music stalls while playing at the beginning, pointing to some bottleneck in their Internet connection or local network. These users are usually on a fast, high-capacity university network, getting files from a robust server, so they shouldn’t normally see this happen, and I would like to track down what is going on. Also when this program is published, it will be deployed to areas of the world where an Internet connection is not so robust. So I’m thinking more and more that it would be vitally important to include tests within the program to monitor and report, if necessary, on the user’s ongoing connection and bandwidth while the program is being used and send me diagnostics when there are problems.

Does anyone have any experience with this kind of thing that I could draw upon or employ?

Peter Bogdanoff