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

UPDATE: It is with mixed feelings I’m happy to have found a resolution to my S2 App lagging issues. I just purchased a new iPad Air 5 and the performance difference from my 1 year old Lenovo & Samsung Tablets is Night & Day. This confirms as I suspected it had nothing to do with Wi-Fi inference, Router type, Router Settings, with or without Sonos Net, hard wiring and so on. I take serious issue with Sonos that I should have to upgrade to an expensive controller to get satisfactory performance. Nowhere have I ever read from Sonos that as you add more and more devices (up to 32 indeed!) you need more horse power in the controller. This explains why the Desktop Windows software runs smoothly on my Laptop (Wi-Fi) or Desktop (hardwired) lots of processing power in these controllers. I don’t have the time or inclination to test a comparable Samsung S8 Tablet to the iPad Air 5 to see if the performance would be the same. If they are, then this would confirm that Android Apps run as smoothly as Apple and indeed you need an expensive Tablet either way.  If they don’t, again shame on Sonos for not making it clear to customers that you will get better performance from Apple devices. My goal here is to help others experiencing the same frustration I was after updating many devices to S2, investing a lot of money in my current 26 devices only to find out I need to spend more money on a Tablet to get them to work properly.

I too would look closer at interference here, as the delay is bound to be down to Sonos ‘device discovery’ by the controller device itself. 

The Sonos controller uses SSDP to initially discover the players, multicasting via UDP to 239.255.255.250:1900 and, for good measure, broadcasting to 255.255.255.255:1900. 

Thereafter communication is unicast.

My thoughts are your controller device and it’s connection to a particular access point, are where to focus your efforts and of course how your devices are connecting to the LAN too.

I have an iPad Pro (Gen 3) controller and use a Plume mesh WiFi setup (6 AP’s), but have a Sonos system (25+ devices) running parallel on SonosNet and despite its 2.4Ghz band limitation, it takes less than 10s to discover all and become ready to control/operate .. If I move the devices over to my WiFi network and ‘bridge’ the Plume access points to my WiFi 6 AX router I can get the discovery down to less than 7 seconds as the plume network is much faster than SonosNet.

These things are down to the speed that your controller can discover your last Sonos device in your setup… moving that last device (if you can discover which one it is) will begin to lessen the lag… and then continue to lessen the discovery time as much as you can.

Check your controller device for ‘MAC spoofing’ in its WiFi connection properties, move any wired devices further away from nearby access points. Try different (fixed) ‘non-overlapping’ WiFi channels and reduce the 2.4ghz band channel-width to 20Mhz only and reserve the Sonos device IP addresses in your routers DHCP reservation table - and maybe get compatible sonos devices running on your 5Ghz band via blacklisting etc; and see if those type of things begin to reduce their discovery time.  

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.

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 

They asked me to do so which I did in one home - that led to the second nightmare in that my particular router BTSuperhub2 couldn’t see any speakers when rebuilding the network.  Hours on the phone with Sonos, switching this setting or that setting on or off. All to no avail, with everything always crashing.  Solved by digging out the router’s predecessor which could find the speakers to enable rebuilding of Sonosnet from scratch with factory reset speakers.

HOWEVER, in the other errant home, I’ve had issues with the router not being able to connect to the internet when there’s been a power outage etc.  So I was reluctant to, and resisted the instruction.  Instead, I factory reset and rebuilt upwards from the Boost upwards without resetting the router.  Easy and now works perfectly (only slight issue was the controller seeing the two new Beam Gen2s, but having to do something additional (can’t recall what now) to complete their set-up.

I’ll shortly be adding ERA speakers to all locations - hope without Sonosnet that this will not be another problem waiting to happen.

(I’m pretty au fait with most things Sonos, having been a relatively early adopter (2010) and having bought thirty or so speakers, most of which are still in use). I usually know how to solve issues of drop-puts/ set-up etc but this “ghosting” baffled me!

I know it’s odd, and contrary to my understanding too, and had the Sonos guys baffled until they took a deep dive look at the diagnostics.  But simplistically, back in the day when all that seemed to be needed was to press two buttons on a speaker to add another speaker, I can see how doing that, to a speaker that already had the speakers in another network in its memory, might somehow bridge two networks (like a continuous daisy chain)  Now, every time I add new “new” speakers, I never know what to expect and it always seems different to the last time (if it in fact can find any speakers to add, as was my other experience on this thread).  For interest only, it was always my fear in another location where I have two holiday rentals adjacent to each other, and they used to share one internet with two Bridges (later Boosts) creating two Sonosnets, that one day a guest would somehow contaminate the separate networks, when a large group was renting both.  They never did, and I now have separate internet accounts, but a couple of occasions I’ve stayed in a different apartment to my previous stay, forgotten to reset my phone controller, and blasted music in the other apartment below!  Early days of introducing Airplay speakers when sharing the same internet across two apartments also potentially had challenges, since the guests could see all airplay enabled speakers on the common internet network!

Whilst it may seem incredulous rather than ludicrous, it is factually correct!  When I submitted diagnostics for both errant homes, he was reeling off speakers by name which were part of the other and vice versa.  I have moved speakers around my various locations and possibly added one without a factory reset - that may mean it brought with it the baggage of other speakers from the other location.  I don’t know how but I do know what the Sonos guy saw because he was able to read out the speakers by name, not all of which were in that location.  If safe sex is always practised, there’s no risk of STI transmission.  If i took a risk (not intentionally) of not taking protection by factory resetting, then I see it as perfectly possible for the cross contamination to have happened.  But I don’t know what happened for sure, I’m only speculating why.  But the effect of whatever happened was very real and correctly diagnosed by the Sonos guy.  

Hi - thank you for your observation.  My issue was - eventually diagnosed by Sonos - is that somehow two of my four homes had infected each other so both was seeing not only its own speakers but those in the other home too and clearly they were many miles away on a different network.   Everything was left unresolved when searching.,,,

Had factory reset everything to solve.

S1/S2 Agnostic since issue affected both equally 

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.

Could you not switch a couple of the speakers temporarily over to a mobile hotspot - just simply add the Hotspot WiFi network to the ‘existing’ Sonos Household via ‘Manage Networks/Update Networks’ and then switch off the local router - note however you need a separate controller and hotspot device (eg: iPhone Hotspot and iPad controller). Just something you could try (perhaps?) to see if the issue was related to the BT network.

Mind you, I would have expected more people to be openly complaining about this matter if that were the case. I’m surprised people have not chimed-in here from the UK, as there must be quite a few who use Sonos on the BT network - but I guess it could just be one of your accounts with the MSP’s you have installed as controlav suggested earlier.

You could also maybe try removing each/all the music services and re-adding them back, one at a time, to see if you can perhaps pin-point the issue down to one specific MSP.

I really don’t doubt what you’re seeing, but anyhow, I simply record a screen-capture video and then use an App called ImgPlay to convert it to an animated.gif (other Apps are available) - The only issue is the upload limit here in the community is 5mb - so the quality is affected greatly with such a small file size limit, but usually when compressed to 10fps enough detail can be shown to demonstrate the issue in the finished uploaded file.

However, moving on, it would be more interesting to see if you get the same issue with an Android mobile controller and also, you could perhaps consider shifting the local system (whichever one you’re nearby now) over to perhaps a mobile wireless connection instead, particularly if you have a decent 4G/5G LTE connection available to the Home environment and see if eliminating the BT connection improves the matter. It’s also still worth trying a different DNS in the router configuration pages, thats if BT routers allow that?

So this is what I see if I search for ‘Beatles’ using the S2 App on an iPhone XR (see attached)…