app is too slow to load

[mackuba]

I have no idea how easy it is to fix it, or if it's the network that is the bottleneck or the CPU, but the fact is, that the app opening experience is far from perfect at the moment.

Compare:

Opening Breadwallet:

• ~1s to launch
• ~1s to type PIN
• ~0s to validate PIN
• ~2s to sync with the network (but you're free to use the UI at that point)

∑ = 2-3s until it's ready to use.

Opening Hive iOS:

• ~5s to launch
• ~1s to type PIN
• ~10s to do whatever it's doing and move to the main screen

∑ = 16s.

Now, I am currently using the absolutely fastest iPhone currently available on the market. There are people who use iPhone 5, iPhone 4S or iPhone 4, and for them it will take either a bit longer or much longer, depending on how much of that is network and how much is CPU.

I know that Breadwallet validates locally and Hive needs to connect to the server to get a PIN. But: 1) users won't know or won't care, 2) even with a network connection it should take maybe 3s. And the launch shouldn't really take 5s either...

[jenbennings]

This is partly due to UIWebView being throttled by iOS. With the release of iOS 8 Apple is implementing WKWebView, which is much more favourable for hybrid apps (source). People are already reporting significant speed improvements, particularly in regards to javascript (anywhere from 20% to 300%).

The bad news, as you may have guessed, is that this will be an iOS 8+ feature. I believe the Cordova team are working on a way to use WKWebView with a fallback to UIWebView for iOS 7, but it's not ready for primetime yet.

[mackuba]

Oh, so it won't work automatically after the update to iOS 8, you need to call different SDK code to get the speedup? That sucks.

[dabura667]

breadwallet is written in objective C and is 100% native for iPhone.

I think the ability to use the same wallet on the web and your phone is a great feature though. (although in actuality... if you wanted to use the hive seed with breadwallet, then you'd get faster access to the same bitcoins... so I could see the dilemma.)

[mackuba]

breadwallet is written in objective C and is 100% native for iPhone.

I am aware of that, I'm just saying that from a user's perspective it won't matter, they will just compare two competing products, and if one of them starts in 3 seconds and the other in 16, they might be inclined to go with the first one.

[ghost]

Absolutely right. We have to improve this.

[dabura667]

breadwallet is written in objective C and is 100% native for iPhone.
I am aware of that, I'm just saying that from a user's perspective it won't matter, they will just compare two competing products, and if one of them starts in 3 seconds and the other in 16, they might be inclined to go with the first one.

I agree. This issue needs to be solved. It's just not surprising, is what I am saying.

Would it be possible to code the local crypto (login section) section only in objective c? or would it be difficult to alter the phonegapped code?

[weilu]

@jsuder roughly what's the percentage of time spent on "verifying pin" vs "synchronizing wallet"?

[mackuba]

Almost all of it on "verifying pin", and "synchronizing wallet" is the last 1-2s.

[mackuba]

So that means it's CPU? What the hell is it doing for 8 seconds?...

[weilu]

"verifying pin" consists of: one network call to fetch the long token, then AES decrypt the seed, calculate wallet id (sha256 the seed), and init wallet with the seed. A quick profiling suggests that wallet initialization took the longest

Poor man's profiling:

operation	ms elapsed since the previous op
start	0
read encrypted credentials from db	1
fetched long token	20
wallet id hashed	12
wallet initialized	221
start syncing	5

Let's zoom into wallet initialization:

operation	ms elapsed since the previous op
start	0
master key from seed buffer	92
derived account zero	50
derived external account	46
derived internal account	36

So yeah... computation. We could store the encrypted internal and external accounts and skip all the derivation, which will definitely speed things up.