Minimal transfer rates for Paratext Live

Question

I am wondering if anyone has been hearing from teams struggling to use Paratext Live in 9.2. A few teams have told me that the shifted to 9.2 and that they think it does not work as well as it did in 9.1. (The entire team was on 9.2 with the latest update)

For one person in that country I asked about transfer rates and she sent results for a test showing 3.47 download and 5.74 upload. The are located in different parts of the country and it is possible others have transfer rates that are even lower. I’m not sure.

Any thoughts or experience would be appreciated.

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Answer 1

I am researching a couple reports to see if I can track down exactly what is causing the issues people have been having.

At this point, I don’t think that transfer rates are the main issue - ping times to the message server may be a problem. I may have been over optimistic about some time out values.

Since the primary editor receives and processes all messages sent by clients in a session, the performance of that machine may be a factor.

I will send an update as I learn more.

John+Wickberg
Paratext Support

Comments

We, that is 2-3 people, are meeting everyday on PT live. We have noticed issues with the live cutting out more often. At the moment only the one person (primary editor) does editing. This was using 9.2 the first update. I wish I knew what details that I should look for to give you some decent feedback.
We are so so grateful for this live function on the program and for all of the other things you are all doing on PT!!!
anon776938

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John+Wickberg:

Since the primary editor receives and processes all messages sent by clients in a session, the performance of that machine may be a factor.

Given this, would it be best for the person with the best internet connection to be the one to initiate a Paratext Live session?

Question on terminology: is “primary editor” always the person who initiates the session? What if one person initiates the session but someone else does all or most of the editing?

Thanks!

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Yes, it would probably be best to have the person with the best internet connection/best machine be the one who iniates a Paratext Live session. Then others can join that session as clients.

Regarding “primary editor”: Whoever starts the session is starting a Paratext Live server on their machine, so that machine would be the “primary editor”: the one that receives and processes all messages sent by clients (Machine A).

However, the machine referred to as the “primary editor” (Machine A) could be different than the person who is doing most of the editing (Machine B). So, you CAN have a different person doing most of the editing.

If the person doing most of the editing (Machine B) has a sub-optimal internet connection / sub-optimal machine, it would probably still be best to have the person with the best internet connection/best machine (Machine A) start the server, because Machine A is processing all of the traffic.

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OK, thanks so much for the excellent clarification! This is good advice.

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Yes - the person with the best connection should start the session.

I started using the term “primary editor” since that’s what we call the user in the code - maybe it is used in a few user messages. Paratext Live has always had one user that was treated a little different than everyone else in the session, With 9.2, this user is just getting the additional responsibility of processing all data for the session. This choice is independent of who is actually doing the editing.

anon773589

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Ok, thanks for the clarification!

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I thought I would follow up with what I’ve learned after looking through some problem reports.

So far, I think the main issue has been time outs. I’m hoping these are mainly fixed in Paratext 9.2.102.6 which is pre-release now, but will be released to everyone next week.

If you are having problems with Paratext Live now and want to try the patch, here’s a direct link you can use to get it before it is officially released:
http://update.ubs-icap.org/Paratext/patch_9.2.102.6.msp

Based on some of the reports, I have added some more error handling code. It’s hard to know what the impact of this will be since I haven’t been able to recreate the errors that I’ve seen in the problem reports. These latest fixes will be in Paratext 9.2.102.7 which will be made a pre-release patch when the .6 patch is released to all users.

I think there still may be one timing issue that needs to be fixed - we should work on that in the next week or so.

We’ll continue to investigate any problems that are reported and we pray that we can make the new server work well for everyone.

John+Wickberg

Answer 2

Thanks; we will be happy to hear. We have several teams who have benefited heavily from Paratext Live. However, I’m not sure that any of them have had successful Paratext Live connections over the internet with 9.2, and so they have gone back to 9.1 or are trying to use something like screen share. We appreciate your efforts to make things work.