GPRS unreliable?

[newmania]

Hi, I have implemented a game that polls the server every 10 seconds. It works fine on the emulator, but on the phone there are problems. Testing with a 7210 and 3510i.

On one 7210 it will poll ok the first few times, then will keep missing polls. On another 7210 it seems to be polling every 10 seconds, but often data doesn't get through to the server. but then other times it will get through.........

Anyone else had similar problems? Am thinking of writing a protocol to remember data that should have been sent, and getting acknowledgements, re-sending data if no acknowledgement received.

Tommy

[lightyear]

hi tommy,

i have watched your threads about gprs connections on forum nokia and want to ask you if you have any new ideas how it should working without polling the server.
we are developing a turn based game and at the moment we are polling every some sec. (midp 1.0 /http) which is not the best way - but i think always the only way

do you have any new ideas on that?
thanks

[markatngame]

You have to retry if a request fails.

The failure rate I've seen is only a few percent, but its really really annoying because failed requests take about 60s to timeout, but that might be a carrier-specific time-out.

An issue: if the request causes a transaction at the server-side then the phone retries the request not knowing it already happened... I recommend making all actions idempotent.

(Idempotent means that doing the operation more than once has the same effect as doing it once only)