DelatChat eats mobile and WLAN data alive

Mutual Help
1

Android Delta Chat version 1.34.10

Expected behavior
Mobile data usage should remain modest,
as long as sent/received chats attachments remain modest.

Actual behavior
In under a month Android usage stats show usage;
Foreground: 648 kB
Background: 1.76 GB

Steps to reproduce the problem

  1. Use Delta Chat on Android without attaching Linux ISOs on a daily basis (or similar)
  2. Have no more mobile data. :face_exhaling:

Any idea what could be triggering this?

2

Maybe a connection bug, look at the log if it tried to reconnect imap all the time, that that could be the cause.

3

Thanks for the hint!
The log on the problematic phone shows a ten times larger logfile than on my own (same DC version, same OS, same email provider similar usage), all entries are from the same day around the same time.

Looks like that might have been the issue - but what can be done to prevent this from happening again?

4

I just checked and noticed I’m affected, too but did not notice since traffic in WLAN is gratis.
Within the last 3 weeks DeltaChat consumed 5 GIGABYTE of traffic, the other phone 11 GIGABTE basically doing nothing.

This is concerning. What can I do? Downgrading to the previous version seems to not change anything.
I’m starting to feel uneasy to have asked people to start using DeltaChat :confounded:

5

if you dont share a log there isnt much we can do to help, I recommend you open an issue over here: https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-android/issues/new/

then provide an anonymized log, or get in touch with some dev there and send the log via email/DC

the usage shouldn’t be that high if you are not sending/receiving big attachments, for example this month/week I have spent 163MB but I download a lot of PDFs of +10MB and DC is my main(basically the only) messenger so I receive hundreds of messages and big attachments per day, several people use DC in my country with limited data plans of 300-600MB per month so absolutely something is not right with your DC

6

btw, we really need some page with stats about sent/received messages and attachments in DC, several other apps have this, ex. Telegram and also Signal IIRC, it is useful in your current situation to know what was your usage

7

I prefer to not make the log public and won’t create a Microsoft account.

Here is the data usage of my phone, though:

image
image1080×2400 172 KB

I rarely use DC and only with a handful of people, we exchanged a few image attachments at best. Unfortunately I use Signal much more often and with more people.
Same situation with the other phone that used 11GB of data. In both cases DC connects to a mail account on the german hoster strato.de.

We both used DC for years and with the same provider without that issue. :man_shrugging:

8

I just checked the months before that, they range from 17MB to 70MB, same usage behavior as now.

9

nobody asked you to do that, that would not be wise. We asked for a censored version that only contains clues about where to find the problem.
If you don’t know how/what to censor there is still the option to send your logs to the devs directly and privately.

Without log there is no real way to know what’s going on and we can not fix the issue.

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