The Phoenix/LiveView-based product that my company makes has a very unusual usage profile. For months at a time, any particular customer will make very light usage of it. Until, suddenly, 20, 50, or even 100 or more users will start pounding on the product at once. This will last for 1-3 weeks before going silent again. This is expected and not a big deal.

However, the industry we serve is such that when these, say, 50+ people are hammering away, they are physically together in the same room as they do so! Furthermore, our customers are not tech savvy and so they tend to all be connected to the same under-powered office WiFi access point.

If this was a normal web application, then that wouldn’t be a problem. But with LiveView I now have 50+ people sitting inches away from each other and trying to keep a persistent websocket connection in place, all while uploading/downloading gigabytes of data per day. The result is calls to our support line saying the product is slow, when in reality they have an oversaturated access point and probably a great deal of EM interference.

What I’d like to do in this situation is simply notify users that their connection is wobbly and provide a link to instructions on how they can mitigate this. I experimented with JavaScript’s navigator.connection property (Chrome only, but that’s okay) and that might be enough. But it didn’t seem to notice when I enabled the liveview socket’s enableLatencySim, and I’m not sure if it should have.

In any event, I’m wondering if anyone else has dealt with this and what solutions you have come up with?

Thanks, Pete