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Anyone else experiencing severe APP LAG & slow loading/refresh with S2?

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controlav
Userlevel 7
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In fairness to BT, they do have a large market share so not u surprisingly will be the subject of a fair number of issues.  Not sure alternative providers are any better or worse. 

Can you just put these iffy BT devices in Bridge mode and use real router? This is what I do in the US with my XFinity-supplied modem.

Author of the leading independent Sonos app for Windows, the only Sonos app for Xbox, and a Sonos app for iOS
I
Userlevel 4
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Finally I’ve found the solution to the laggy controller in my case.  Out of my four households, I found two (S2) were functioning with no search/ app control lag.

The other two households (S1 and S2) were both experiencing the same issue of severe controller lag, sometimes not even returning search results.

I’ve submitted diagnostics from the two affected households and it was discovered that each household had “phantom” players (not visible in the app but picked up by the diagnostic) belonging to the other laggy household.  There was therefore some confusion over the network of speakers. I had upgraded some speakers and given a couple away but moved a Play 1 between houses.  Seems the factory reset may not have been effective and caused a bridge between the two households.

Finally resolved in one of the households (not yet visited the other) by totally factory resetting everything.

(That in itself was a nightmare since in the time since I originally set the system up I’d changed the router from BTHub6 to BT Superhub2, just by changing the wired connection from the Boost to the hub with no resetting required.  It wasn't apparent then since effectively I just “plugged and played” a ready configured system, that starting from scratch with Superhub2 would be so problematic.  Unable to get any speakers to be found other than eventually the Boost, but even hardwiring other players to that wouldn't connect.  Numerous repeated factory resets to no avail. Sonos help on the phone for longtime with suggestions but still no success.  Apparently there was an issue with original Superhub2 software in 2021 but this was fixed.  Mine is running latest version.  Fortunately I had the predecessor BTHub6 and setting up Boost and Sonosnet using that was relatively straightforward (with few connection problems which needed hardwiring / factory resetting (again) before finally up and running.  Then switched Boost and connected system to Superhub2 ethernet and it continues to work fine.

J

My Sonos system became unreliable lately. Speakers drop, lose their pairing. And S2 is awful. Slow to load, sometimes not showing devices. Every time the screen saver starts on my AppleTV I know that I’m in for an annoying few minutes of waiting for the app to load, waiting for devices to finally appear . . . It’s painful. And yes, I’ve rebooted things, reset speakers, etc. These issues are new. Go back to May and everything was great.
 

It’s definitely the app. I just paired my Arc with a Play5. The lag was incredible. 
 

Also, I don’t want to hear from the troll who says this isn’t an issue because the thread isn’t packed with people complaining. This is a real issue.

Airgetlam

Pretty sure John B didn’t write the app, as he isn’t a Sonos employee.

Bruce
I
Userlevel 4
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Submitted diagnostic 90385481

Airgetlam

Now you just need to call Sonos support, and give them that diagnostic number. 

Bruce
K
Userlevel 6
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Thanks Bruce,

Really this question is directed AT THE SONOS COMMUNITY - not support as you can probably tell from my postings. 

I’m asking if ANY other Sonos S2 users have experienced the Sonos applications reacting/launching/refreshing slowly compared to other iOS/Android apps and S1.

 

I do agree that it makes it tough when Sonos’ support has their hands tied with communicating broadly to the community. 

 

Ken_Griffiths

I have experienced the same app loading lag and have had a few SONOS speakers simply disappear from my system. I unplug, reboot every few days which temporarity fixes it. This ALL started when I began using S2. S1 worked flawlessly for years. My feeling is S2 coincided with SONOS dumping the abillity to play Apple Music and the roll out of their own competing streaming music service. It’s like the app is now so larded down that it just takes a while to load and has glitches. 

This is exactly the situation where setting reserved IP addresses would help. The router keeps losing track of IP addresses. Setting up reserved IPs would help that router from ending up in that state again, and keep that annoying delay/dropping from happening.
 

It would be easier to point the finger at Sonos and their S2 software, and wait for a ‘bug fix’, but it is a local router issue, and not something Sonos can address. 

I use FING to search my local network and I can see each of my SONOS products has their own IP address. I do have 55 IP addresses in my system….perhaps that is too many.

I have three times that amount of devices on my Home network, so it’s not that,  it takes less than 10s to open the Sonos app from a fully closed state and to find 25+ devices here on the wireless LAN (IP addresses are reserved in my case for all my Sonos devices)  - but if you’re having difficulty, then check the devices SNR levels - get them all with a reading of 45dB or higher and ideally where practical, put them on the faster 5Ghz band. Reduce any local WiFi interference too.

It’s also worth just backgrounding the App, when its not in use, rather than fully closing it, as that only takes less time to bring it into focus and have things working (ensure the device is not using things like WiFi calling and don’t have the App set to use mobile data, aswell as WiFi, as those things can give a slight improvement too.

controlav
Userlevel 7
Badge +23

Device discovery is entirely the same whether it is S1 or S2. Your router is by far the most probable cause, please tell us what kind it is (and whether you are using WiFi [likely] or SonosNet [less likely].

Device discovery is:

SSDP broadcast (3 seconds per UPnP spec)

SSDP multicast (3 seconds concurrent with broadcast)

mDNS search (concurrent)

When a device is found (on the correct Household) then it is scanned for services, and the interesting services are subscribed to. Some UPnP calls are also made to each device.

That is all local network device-to-device calls, and as we have seen too many times, some routers suck at this.

None of this has changed between S1 and S2.

If using a PC or a Mac then there are some human-readable logs generated which might give a clue. On all devices you can always generate a Diagnostic for Sonos support to take a look at.

Author of the leading independent Sonos app for Windows, the only Sonos app for Xbox, and a Sonos app for iOS
P

Wow. So that’s interesting. Sounds like you are suggesting running all speakers in WiFi mode and disconnecting the Sonos connects. I could try that. My objective has been to try and cable more speakers via Ethernet. 
 

also. The Orbi satellites are cabled back to a switch then back to a patch panel to the main router. I could bypass the switch and just do a direct cable connection. 
 

finally my new IPS doesn’t require a cable modem so that isn’t a favor.  
 

I’ll give this all a try but find it hard to believe that wireless could be the solution vs a mixed bag or wired and wireless. Sonos has suggest I try to wire more. I may actually try to shut down any that aren’t wired to see if that improves things. They seemed to indicate that once I get past 5 in a group it could be a problem. 
 

thanks for your guidance. 

P
Userlevel 2
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Anywhere I can get instructions on how to fix or reserve IP’s? I have  one main AT&T router which has fiver optic 250+ speed and then two Ubiquti routers elsewhere in the house. They have different names with all the SONOS speakers and amps using the Ubitqutis.

If using Ubiquiti WiFi then this link might perhaps be useful to you too…

https://github.com/IngmarStein/unifi-sonos-doc

I also have this note for Unifi access points…

  1. Uncheck “Enable multicast enhancement (IGMPv3)”. 
  2. Do not check “Block LAN to WLAN Multicast and Broadcast Data”

…and I’ve seen other users here in the community mention the following;

  • Log into the UniFi controller.
  • In the Settings tab, click Wireless Networks.
  • Click Edit next to the network SSID.
  • Expand Advanced Options.
  • Uncheck Block LAN to WLAN Multicast and Broadcast Data.
  • In the Settings tab, click Sites.
  • Disable Auto-Optimize Network.

I hope this helps.

 

Thanks! I’ll go do this as soon as I can….

Stanley_4
Userlevel 7
Badge +22

Anywhere I can get instructions on how to fix or reserve IP’s? I have  one main AT&T router which has fiver optic 250+ speed and then two Ubiquti routers elsewhere in the house. They have different names with all the SONOS speakers and amps using the Ubitqutis.

 

You need to go to the Ubiquity router’s DHCP Settings page and set the static/reserved IP addresses there.

 

Maybe?  https://community.ui.com/questions/USG-DHCP-Reservations/4841af19-d873-47b0-afba-262a0a97cf97

controlav
Userlevel 7
Badge +23

The system gets the streams straight from the internet. For your phone to connect the system your network is needed. Which is where the interference could come in…….

Yes but why is it only the Sonos app, or connecting to the Sonos system has this issue?

Because Sonos requires inter-device communication on the local network to work correctly, and sadly many routers can’t do this correctly.

Author of the leading independent Sonos app for Windows, the only Sonos app for Xbox, and a Sonos app for iOS
controlav
Userlevel 7
Badge +23

That’s absolutely fascinating. And counter to the way I understood the software to work. Thanks for the followup.

The S2 app these days caches the details of all speakers it has seen (so it can show the little spanner/wrench icon when they are “missing”). The app obviously cannot “see” other networks, but it sounds like this caching code is broken somewhere and caused the OPs problem by spending too much time trying to “find” these missing devices. Which makes no actual sense, if they didn’t respond to the SSDP call at startup then it should give up IMHO.

Factory resetting everything is an overkill solution, a reinstall or reset of the app should have fixed it much more quickly.

This cache is not required for a functioning system.

Author of the leading independent Sonos app for Windows, the only Sonos app for Xbox, and a Sonos app for iOS
J

Even the PC app takes an age to sort itself out and load. Slow updating on Android, used to be a really quick to load but obviously doing too much at startup. 

Except that mine still only takes 2 seconds to load, and this thread still has only a few posts after nearly three months.

P
Userlevel 2
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Ubiquiti Unifi 6 I think. They may be access points.

Maybe this will assist? …

 

Thanks! I’ll check it out….

G

I’ve also been experiencing this lag in the app for some time finding all the system components upon launching the app.
 

I recently went into my router settings, and reserved/assigned  specific IP addresses (vs dynamic assignments by the router) for every Sonos product in the system (which is a considerable amount of Sonos Products, I admit). . My experience so far is an immediate and considerable  improvement in load time and listing all the products in the system. 
 

I’m not suggesting this may work well for everyone, but time will tell for me. So far, I have completely closed the app several times, and upon opening the app, I am currently down to 5-6 sec for finding a system with over 24 components! Let's see if this lasts! 

106rallye
Userlevel 7
Badge +17

If the Bridge worked well for you, you could pick up it's successor, the Boost, while it is still available - it is out of production.

 

Your statement “its the ability of the Sonos app to connect to the Sonos system” might be read as if it puts the blame on the app. Remember the app is running on your phone, that needs to mak the connection to your network and down the line to your devices. The problem could also be the connection between your phone and the network.

 

I
Userlevel 4
Badge +4

Thanks - this makes sense but one of the households was still on S1 (I’ve a solitary Play 5 remaining which I use for line out ) and the other S2.  Both had issues.  Both do and had been functioning when the “spanner” missing speakers occasionally appeared.  The first port of call was to reset and ultimately reinstall the apps but these just reconnected to the broken systems so some legacy  info was being carried by the Boost / speakers.  System update wasn’t the issue either since all were current.  The only apparent fix was total factory reset although as I found on the second reset (S2 properly) due to my reluctance to reset the router, the router reset was not actually required.  Best wishes 

Ken_Griffiths

I would guess for an iPhone or iPad/iPad Pro with 26 Sonos network devices to respond to the multicast packets for ‘device discovery’, we’re probably talking about 7 seconds from App launch and probably 2 or 3 seconds when launching the app from a background state.

I don’t mind the wait on my older controller devices and if any devices are not discovered, then in my own past experience, that’s usually been down to local network conditions - which of course can change quite often in some circumstances, like being located next to several neighbouring properties which may auto-change their WiFi settings on router startup, or update etc.

A

Hi, I’ve been experiencing similar issues since I upgraded to the S2 app too.

“When people OPEN their Sonos S2 app does it take 10-40 seconds to load/refresh?  Is it laggy when changing sources, volume levels? Do the graphics take time to load after the app has started?” - Yes!

I have recently bought an Amp, Move and Arc and connecting to those speakers via AirPlay and the Sonos S2 app were very unreliable (also my other Sonos speakers). As you described my S2 experience was very laggy, taking many seconds to connect to the speakers if I was lucky. As you have experienced yourself, this was immensely frustrating when spending a not small amount of money on Sonos speakers expecting them to perform professionally and very disappointing.

Since researching about this issue and coming across this community post, I’ve now connected one of my speakers directly to my router, which means my Sonos speakers are now using SonosNet Channel 6 (you can also choose channel 1 or 11) to talk to each other rather than using my Wi-Fi channels and the lag has almost disappeared (AirPlay connection reliability seems to have improved too). This may have been caused by too many devices being on my Wi-Fi router. I only carried this out earlier today, but the results so far have been very promising.

I know there has been an update to the S2 App since you posted this, so I may also be experiencing an improved service due to the App update. I hope this helps.

D

Same problem for me.  EVERY time I open the S2 app, it takes 10-30 seconds to load.  No other apps have this issue.

 

update:  uninstalling and reinstalling the S2 app resolved it for me.

Airgetlam

The ‘lag time’ is a pretty good indicator of some sort of interference between the controller and the actual application running on the speaker. I’d be pretty strongly looking at the wifi interference FAQ, and if that didn’t help, I’d be submitting a system diagnostic within 10 minutes of experiencing this problem, and calling Sonos Support to discuss it.

There may be information included in the diagnostic that will help Sonos pinpoint the issue and help you find a solution.

When you speak directly to the phone folks, they have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your Sonos system and network.

Bruce
106rallye
Userlevel 7
Badge +17

Using what service? I do not recognise this - I’m using Spotify.

Airgetlam

Since the controller is talking to the app running on the speakers, unless there’s an issue with the controller device talking to the router, it shouldn’t make any difference which controller you’re using.

I’d suspect a duplicate IP address issue at first blush, although DNS issues can’t be ruled out, there are a lot of things involved with network events such as a search.  This is why a diagnostic submitted within 10 minutes, followed by a call to Sonos, who has the ability to read them, is helpful. We peons on this forum don’t have access to that hard data. 

Bruce

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