Log to file

[larssn]

What feature would you like to see?

That setLoggingEnabled supports logging to a file, and not just the console.

How would you use it?

We need to debug strange (seemingly firestore related) issues in the field. It's much easier to have the clients upload a file to Firebase storage.

[google-oss-bot]

I couldn't figure out how to label this issue, so I've labeled it for a human to triage. Hang tight.

[MarkDuckworth]

Thanks for the suggestion @larssn. I'll review this request with the team this week.

[MarkDuckworth]

@larssn, it's helpful to hear about the challenges you've had getting logs from client's devices. I passed this feedback along to the relevant team. I don't have a timeline for when we will have a solution to this, or if the solution will involve logging to a file. But the feedback is still useful.

In the meantime, I just want to confirm you have a workaround to get logs off the customer devices?

[larssn]

We have no workaround atm. Suggestions would be welcome! 😊

The challenges we're facing is that the Firestore layer "seemingly" stops working in its entirety for certain few customers. Also Firestore is slow to detect coming out of standby/doze.

Issue 1 - Firestore stops working completely

• Firestore live listeners stops working, completely. Even from the local cache.
• Seeming, writes also break because of this, because other devices on the network are never notified of any.
• Restarting the app completely doesn't fix the problem, nor does restarting the device.
• Deleting the database (NOT the cache) for the app was the only way to make Firestore work again.

This issue is somewhat rare, but can cause a lot of havoc since we're working with money. The device type affected is (as far as I know), the Verifone T650P, which is an Android payment device running Android 8.1.

I suspect the local database on the device gets corrupted, which breaks Firestore completely. This is just a gut feeling though.

Issue 2 - Firestore is slow to detect the device coming out of standby/doze.

After coming out of standby, live listeners take minutes to "wake up", which is unfortunate if the usage pattern is: wake up, do quick work, put back in standby (meaning some data might never arrive).

This feels a lot like an issue I was crusading about a while ago, which turns out was a problem in gRPC: grpc/grpc-java#8855

The devices affected are again the Verifone T650P, so maybe Android 8.1 has different hooks coming out of standby? I haven't had time to investigate this, and I won't have for a while.

Hopefully logging can shed some light on the above situations though.

cc @Christiantillty