Re: Keeping up data channel

On 06/13/2012 01:01 AM, Martin Thomson wrote:
> On 12 June 2012 13:15, Stefan Hakansson LK
> <stefan.lk.hakansson@ericsson.com>  wrote:
>> I think we need to make developers close the PeerConnection when it is not
>> needed. A way to promote this would of course be to make PeerConnection set
>> up fast.
>
> Unfortunately, responsiveness is also a trait that is valued highly.
> Setup for data channels is currently prohibitively long.  Applications
> that are not specifically targeting mobile users will have abysmal
> performance on mobile networks initially.  Expect the radio to remain
> on constantly.

Is there anything we could do? I was last night thinking about: what if 
we added "disable" and "enable" to PeerConnection. It would simplify for 
app developers since incoming MediaStream objects (that they have 
attached to video elements for display), DataChannel objects etc. would 
remain in the app and would not have to be set up again.

However, this would not cure the responsiveness problem. Is there 
anything that could be done there (perhaps in combinations with 
"disable"; a PeerConnection that is in state "disable" would be faster 
into "enable" than starting from scratch)?

Another track is the new W3C CG on "Network-Friendly App and WebApp Best 
Practices Community Group" 
(http://www.w3.org/community/networkfriendly/). They produce guidelines, 
and are also taking power consumption into account. Perhaps we could add 
some text to their guidelines at a later stage.

>
> I expect that many developers will come down on the wrong side of the
> tradeoff, especially since we give them such an awful set of choices -
> massive latency or massive battery use.  Natural selection of a sort
> will prevail.  I suspect that problems will surface pretty quickly.
> Mobile applications that are bad at this tend to get a reputation
> pretty quickly and people stop using them.
>
> --Martin

Received on Wednesday, 13 June 2012 06:12:44 UTC