CsWeb and Windows

Discussions about syncing data via Bluetooth, Dropbox, FTP, and using CSWeb
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AriSilva
Posts: 591
Joined: July 22nd, 2016, 3:55 pm

CsWeb and Windows

Post by AriSilva »

Help,
I´m in real trouble trying to synchronize PCs using windows and the CsWeb.
Everything works fine when we were using tables with android, but we decide to make a survey using PCs.
When testing the programs everything worked, but now we have 70 people doing CATI with telephones, and using their PCs to record the answers.
The problem is that some PCs work fine, the transmission is OK, we can store the survey i the CsWeb, but others (and we tried everything to find the differences) are having al sort of trouble when trying to connect with the CsWeb server.
1. In a PC (and I saw it by operating the PC using TeamViewer), when executing the syncconect with get or put the system seems to be working, does not give any message and closes the CsPro application.
2. There are a bunch of them (at least 9) that the system does not give any error message, returns a true for the syncdata, but does not transmit anything, because we checked the serer and the data is not there.
3. Another one got a message that the server could not acknowledge the transmission and asked for the user to look at the log file (unfortunately I could not see this log it was not on my machine).
So, is there any problems in the configuration of those PCs that prevent them to communicate with the server?
What can I do to upload the data to the server?
Best
Ari
Best
Ari
josh
Posts: 2399
Joined: May 5th, 2014, 12:49 pm
Location: Washington DC

Re: CsWeb and Windows

Post by josh »

Sorry to hear about these issues. I don't know of any particular problems syncing with PCs. I do most of my testing of sync using a PC and have not seen any of the issues that you mentioned. If you can figure out what is different about the failing PCs and/or send us a sync.log file that would help diagnose the problem. By the way with CSPro 7.4 you can get the sync.log file on Windows from the Help-->Troubleshooting menu.

I would also make sure that you can reach the CSWeb server via the web browser on the machines that are failing to sync just to make sure is not a network issue of some kind. Other than differences in the network configuration of the PC and of the network it is on (router/firewall...) I can't think of any other configuration that would make a difference for sync.

I suppose that if you are sending really large amounts of data there could be issues with memory. When we upload the cases for sync we write them out to an in-memory buffer first and then upload from that buffer. That buffer is allocated using a single block of consecutive memory so if you have a machine with little available memory or where the memory was highly fragmented that memory allocation could fail. I have only seen this in testing where I was uploading 100+mb worth of data at a time. Currently we limit the size of a single block of cases to be sent to 10mb to avoid this problem. Anything over 10mb is broken up into multiple blocks. In theory if your system memory was very limited you could get an error trying to allocate that 10mb block of memory but that seems very unlikely. In CSPro 7.5 we are improving sync so that we won't need to use the buffering so it will use less memory. You can see the size of the data being sent in the sync.log file. It would show something like this:

Code: Select all

2020-05-27 13:16:15,656 INFO: Chunk time Seconds : 0.632946 Cases: 100 Kb: 182.233 mbps 2.3033
That shows it sent 100 cases and the data size was 182Kb.

In the case where the system does not transmit anything perhaps CSPro thinks that those cases have been sent already. If that were case you would see the following line in the sync.log:

Code: Select all

2020-05-27 13:16:14,324 INFO: Total new/modified cases since last sync: 0
If you modify a case (change any field, change it back and then save the case) then CSPro will see that it has changed and should send it for the next sync.
AriSilva
Posts: 591
Joined: July 22nd, 2016, 3:55 pm

Re: CsWeb and Windows

Post by AriSilva »

Thanks Josh,
I´m still using 7.3 for this survey.
The questionnaire is very short, less than 1K bytes in a single record.
The files are also very small, they have at most 10 or 20 questionnaires now (of course they will increase as the interviewers work more days.)
Does it have anything to do with the CsWeb configuration?
Could you point me out to where I could find the log file?
Do you think the problem might be related with the windows firewall that it is preventing the communication?
I´m really at a loss here.
Any idea will help to solve the problem.
Best
Best
Ari
josh
Posts: 2399
Joined: May 5th, 2014, 12:49 pm
Location: Washington DC

Re: CsWeb and Windows

Post by josh »

Given the size of the files it doesn't sound like it could be a memory issue.

You can find the sync.log file at C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\CSPro. You can also use %appdata%\CSPro which is easier since you don't need to know the username. %appdata% is an alias for the current users appdata folder.

I would be surprised if it were the firewall since CSWeb uses port 80 which is the default port for all web traffic. You could be sure by trying to connect the CSWeb server in the web browser by one of the machines that is having errors.
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