For the past few days, my previously functioning, Vera Alerts has developed a delay of 5 to 10 minutes for the first alert. For example, a door open alert will take 10 minutes to reach the phone. However, after that first alert has arrived, re-openeing the door results in a near immediate Vera Alert notification. But, after a few minutes to hours without alerts, the first alert is again delayed.
I’ve rebooted the phone a few times and there are no new or running apps, configuration changes(phone or Vera) or anything else local that I am aware of.
I have not experienced this particular issue that I am aware of but it is worth worth mentioning that many many users, myself included, have experienced many blank alerts in the past few months.
An upgrade from Android 4.2 to 4.3 prompted me to dig into this annoying issue further. I’ve finally figured out what this problem is, but I don’t have a palatable fix for it.
This issue is due to a TCP session timeout that, in my case, occurs on Spint’s 4G network and some WiFi routers with low TCP session timeout values. My home WiFi with a one hour TCP session timeout never delays Vera Alerts. Vera Alert notifications always come in within 5 seconds, usually less than 3.
My research indicates that Android devices appear to use the GTalk Service Monitor(##8255##) to ping the Google servers approximately every 10-15 minutes. This is supposed to keep the session open and if it is broken, recreate the session. This still doesn’t explain why my alerts can suffer delays of up to 30 minutes, it seems that they should never be delayed more than 15 minutes.
It had previously gone unnoticed by me, but this session timeout issue affects notifications from other Google services, such as Gmail and Hangouts, as well. This may even be a reason for some people complaining about Micasaverde notification emails being delayed if they were using GMail on their phones to receive the notification.
As I said in my original post, the failures or delays are a recent manifestation and I made no changes to my device. So either Sprint has reduced the TCP session timeout on their network(seems likely) or Google extended the [tt]gtalk_%heartbeat_ping_interval_ms[/tt] (I have found no evidence to support this).
Sadly, it appears that there is no way for me to fix this without rooting the phone and using something like Push Notification Fixer. I tried calling Sprint and you know how that went!
Best Home Automation shopping experience. Shop at Ezlo!