Slow loading on iPad

[CBill]

Hi all,

I am having trouble running an experiment on an iPad.

When I run the experiment, every couple of trials a blank page will load with the following message:

‘Please wait while the resources are preloading, This may take up to 1min.’

After ~30-40sec the next trial will load and you can continue. You can complete the whole experiment, however, it takes quite a long time and is quite a disjointed experience.

The strange this is, this only seems to happen on iOS devices. I have tested it on two different iPads and an iPhone, and they all have this issue. In contrast, I have tested the experiment on an android phone (Pixel) and two Macbooks and it runs perfectly fine on these devices, with no delay between any of the trials.

Any thoughts on what is going on, or how I might be able to fix this. My plan is to run this experiment with children and that is why I would like to be able to run the experiment on an iPad. And other than this one issue, it works very well.

Thanks for any help.

[florians]

Hi Cory – what browser are you using on the iOS devices? Have you tried different ones? That might be worth a try for starters if you haven’t done that already.

[CBill]

Hi Florian,

Yeah I have tried using Safari, Firefox, and Chrome and all seem to have exactly the same issue.

I have also tried the following with no change in the behavior:

– Forcing the experiment to load the resources using the ‘PennController.CheckPreloaded()’ command.
– Accessing the resources from a zipped folder using the ‘PennController.PreloadZip() command.

[CBill]

Also, I just timed the pauses, and they are always 1 minute long, so it seems like it might be timing out each time?

The current version of the experiment takes ~1min 30secs to complete on a computer, and ~10min to complete on an iPad.

[Jeremy]

Hi Cory,
There seem to be issues with the preloading of audio files, maybe your problem is related. What resources does your experiment use?

If you have a link to your experiment, feel free to share it with us so we can look into the script.

Jeremy

[CBill]

Hi Jeremy,

Here is the link: https://expt.pcibex.net/ibexexps/CBill/NDC_Child/experiment.html

I have been playing around with it a bit, and I think it is something to do with the audio files, as when I remove audio files from an item, it loads immediately.

I have tried .mp3 and .wav audio file formats and both seem to have the same issue. Could a different format work better? We will be running this experiment in daycares using the same 1 or 2 iPads, so it would be fine to have the files in a format that only works on iPads or certain browsers

[Jeremy]

Can you try updating your version of PennController to this dev version?
repo url: https://github.com/PennController/Sync
branch/revision: dev-cory

[CBill]

Yes, it is working perfectly now!

Thanks Jeremy.

[Author]

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