Immich app unusably slow on Android with ~15.000 photos on the phone

[AleXburnA]

The bug

Dear Immich-Team,

first - thanks for this great piece of software! It works very good so far, but there is one annoying thing, which breaks the usage for my wife.

She uses a Samsung Galaxy S20 and has ~15.000 photos on the local SD card and all of them are synced to Immich. I assume this is the reason why the Immich App on her phone is almost unusable. It's getting stuck all the time: during scrolling, during photo viewing, basically during all activities within the app.

This breaks our use case: We create shared albums e.g. for vacations. When I share some pictures from my phone into this album, it takes several hours until it eventually shows up on her end. The other way round is not much better: Although the photos have been uploaded and are already visible on the Immich website, her app still doesn't recognize them as "uploaded" and therefore doesn't allow to put it into albums. The next thing is that she needs to delete photos in Immich in order to have them deleted in both Immich and local album. This is almost impossible as the app always hangs. Sometimes this results in an inconsistent situation where photos that have already been deleted are still displayed with an exclamation mark (see screenshots). This fixes itself after a few hours.

All in all, the app is therefore not usable for my wife. Those problems are frustrating for her and reduces the WAF quite a bit. :-)
I know it may be an edge-case that she has so many local photos. Nevertheless, I think that the app should be able to handle a large number of local photos too.

I don't have any of those problems on my phone (iPhone 14), but I only have around 1000 pictures locally.
Please find attached the recent log file from her phone, with lots of errors in it.

We're using the latest Immich App version 1.105.0 on both phones. Immich server is on latest 1.105.1. Server and website are working fairly well and so does the app on my phone. Its just on her phone.

Please find attached the latest logfile from her app, as well as some screenshots to illustrate the issues.

Is this a well-known issue? Do you have any ideas how to improve the situation?
If you need more (or more detailed) information, please just tell me and I'll happily provide it.
Thanks in advance!

Immich_log_2024-05-20T14:55:30.808311.log

The OS that Immich Server is running on

Ubuntu 22.04

Version of Immich Server

v1.105.1

Version of Immich Mobile App

v1.105.0

Platform with the issue

• Server
• Web
• Mobile

Your docker-compose.yml content

not needed, as the server runs great

Your .env content

not needed, as the server runs great

Reproduction steps

1.) Have 15.000 photos on an android phone
2.) Install Immich and sync them to Immich
3.) Immich app gets very slow

Relevant log output

look at the attachment to see the whole file, here are some lines I find very suspect:

# Loading assets takes 42 seconds
2024-05-20 14:42:42.460933 | INFO     | SyncService          | Upserted 18 assets into the DB |
2024-05-20 14:42:15.846355 | INFO     | AssetNotifier        | Load assets: 41256ms |
2024-05-20 14:42:15.846283 | INFO     | AlbumService         | Syncing completed. Changes: true |


# Sometimes even longer:
2024-05-02 16:49:43.451991 | INFO     | AssetNotifier        | Load partner assets: 1054ms |
2024-05-02 16:49:42.404474 | INFO     | BackupNotifier       | [_resumeBackup] Start back up |
2024-05-02 16:16:33.969330 | INFO     | AssetNotifier        | Load partner assets: 265461ms |
2024-05-02 16:16:33.964151 | INFO     | AssetNotifier        | Load assets: 265435ms |
2024-05-02 16:16:33.963638 | INFO     | AlbumService         | Syncing completed. Changes: true |


# Sometimes flutter errors:

2024-05-18 16:17:04.868065 | SEVERE   | ImmichErrorLogger    | PlatformDispatcher - Catch all | ApiException 400: {"message":"Not found or no album.read access","error":"Bad Request","statusCode":400} |
#0      AlbumApi.getAlbumInfo (package:openapi/api/album_api.dart:313)
<asynchronous suspension>
#1      AlbumService.refreshRemoteAlbums.<anonymous closure> (package:immich_mobile/services/album.service.dart:164)
<asynchronous suspension>
#2      SyncService._addAlbumFromServer (package:immich_mobile/services/sync.service.dart:436)
<asynchronous suspension>
#3      diffSortedLists (package:immich_mobile/utils/diff.dart:21)
<asynchronous suspension>
#4      SyncService._syncRemoteAlbumsToDb (package:immich_mobile/services/sync.service.dart:306)
<asynchronous suspension>
#5      AsyncMutex.run.<anonymous closure> (package:immich_mobile/utils/async_mutex.dart:15)
<asynchronous suspension>

2024-05-18 16:17:04.867917 | SEVERE   | ImmichErrorLogger    | PlatformDispatcher - Catch all | ApiException 400: {"message":"Not found or no album.read access","error":"Bad Request","statusCode":400} |
#0      AlbumApi.getAlbumInfo (package:openapi/api/album_api.dart:313)
<asynchronous suspension>
#1      AlbumService.refreshRemoteAlbums.<anonymous closure> (package:immich_mobile/services/album.service.dart:164)
<asynchronous suspension>
#2      SyncService._addAlbumFromServer (package:immich_mobile/services/sync.service.dart:436)
<asynchronous suspension>
#3      diffSortedLists (package:immich_mobile/utils/diff.dart:21)
<asynchronous suspension>
#4      SyncService._syncRemoteAlbumsToDb (package:immich_mobile/services/sync.service.dart:306)
<asynchronous suspension>
#5      AsyncMutex.run.<anonymous closure> (package:immich_mobile/utils/async_mutex.dart:15)
<asynchronous suspension>


# and a lot more errors in the log file attached...

Additional information

No response

[bo0tzz]

I think this might be a duplicate of #2128. Can you try enabling "Prefer remote images" in the app settings?

[alextran1502]

15000 photos on the phone should be fine. Are you accessing over local IP or DNS? Can you try to have her phone access to the local IP?

[AleXburnA]

15000 photos on the phone should be fine. Are you accessing over local IP or DNS? Can you try to have her phone access to the local IP?

Thats not an easy task to be honest, as Immich runs behind a caddy reverse proxy on my public server. Caddy routes only request to that very hostname to Immich. If you have a reasonable suspicion, I am happy to rebuild it temporarily to test it out, but I cannot really imagine that it would fix anything tbh. I am using the same FQDN on my phone in the same WIFI network and I don't have any of those problems.

I think this might be a duplicate of #2128. Can you try enabling "Prefer remote images" in the app settings?

Thats a good hint, I will try that tomorrow and report back. The log shows loading times of up to 265 seconds, so the workaround should definitely improve the situation. The strange thing is that it's not just the loading of the thumbnails, but that the whole app is unusable. Anyways, I'll test and report back.

Thanks to both of you for your ideas!

[AleXburnA]

I can confirm that enabling „prefer remote images“ improved the situation a lot! There are still situations where the app freezes for 5-10 seconds but at least it got better. Thanks for the hint. Thumbs pressed that you are able to find the root cause behind the bug. Thanks for the great work!

[klejejs]

I observed the same issue on iOS. Enabling „prefer remote images“ helped a lot as well but I still sometimes get stutters.

[matejkramny]

If you tried the same account on the iphone, i would guess it's that the sd card itself is comparably slower to onboard storage which causes the app to lag. You could try moving the photos onto the phone or get a faster sd card (or maybe you already have a decent one)?

[AleXburnA]

Could actually be a reason. But since the whole UI freezes, no matter where you are in the app, and the whole thing is reproducible, I'm now thinking more in the direction of your bug. #10030

Maybe it's a combination: maybe the huge DB query locks the UI. Perhaps it is not noticeable in many scenarios because there are not so many local photos. Anyway, my gut feeling is that decoupling the DB thread from the UI (if I'm saying this correctly) might help in my case too.

[matejkramny]

Some more discussion around the bug in my WIP PR implementing it: #10668

I've also tested this a bit more by downloading about 100k demo photos to my immich server and dummy user - the app seemed fine (compared to my ~80k photos).
I don't think it's the number of photos, but maybe some photos are special or it's the number of videos.. I'm at a loss though as debugging doesn't help when the app freezes / flutter crashes.

Doing the DB queries (and API calls, parsing) in another thread is the way forward as the maintainers suggested, but it's not a trivial task.

My hunch are the reactive components watching the database and perhaps doing too many refreshes or something

[smiba]

I'm dealing with a similar issue where scrolling through my photos takes seconds if not longer on Android. I don't think this was the case months ago, enabling "Prefer Remote Images" in the settings made it a lot faster again... But why is this?

I'm sure my Samsung Flip 5 storage is faster than my cellular

Only thing I've recently changed is my preview settings in the Administration panel of Immich, from JPEG to WEBP. Maybe these take significantly longer to decode?

[smiba]

I've made a video showing the issue here: https://youtu.be/NHyzHY1YqDw

[ericmuijs]

I had the same issue. Have more than 100K photos and videos. On my S23 lots of stutters when scrolling and phone become very hot. Better with prefer remote. Still the app is very stuttery somehow. Fresh install and probably my server is still processing some of the images.

Love the app and the platform though, I'm truly impressed.

[matejkramny]

The reason I can think of is the native API to get the system file on the phone is somehow very slow

@alextran1502 That can't be the case when [the app that shan't be named] doesn't have this problem. I think it might be with the plugin that handles images, it has a native counterpart in (kotlin/java, swift) and there's a Flutter bridge that it communicates with. That may be the bottleneck, either due to the fact that Flutter isolates are single-thread or it's doing some encoding/decoding in Flutter to resize the image.

Remote images might not have this problem even if it's slower to get the actual image, it might not be suffering the same issue.

[smiba]

I've made a video showing the issue here: https://youtu.be/NHyzHY1YqDw

@alextran1502 I was wondering if you've seen this video demonstrating the issue, as I think it shows it quite well

[alextran1502]

@smiba yes, I can see it on my test Android device

[Acidiphilium]

I have the same problem and also looks like it tries to regenerate thumbnails on each immich start. Like it doesn't store them on the phone for faster rendering. It makes the app quite "slow" or let's say not very responsive compared to Google Photos. On my phone it's still usable as if I wait several seconds (around 5sec) then all my 20k photos thumbs are then appearing quickly when I scroll even if I scroll far it takes only around 1-2 secs no more (but again not as quick as Google Photos which has almost no delay, like perfectly fluid). So usable yes but not perfect.

But but the option "Prefer remote images" is the workaround. No more 5sec delay at immich start and scroll is almost like without any delay.

[Gitonthegrid]

I have the same sort of problems, but then with "people".

If I click on a person, it takes forever to load them..
The normal pictures are "fine" with loading. Not the best, but fine.

[kevincox]

I'm seeing serious jank with a library of 73k photos and 6k videos on 1.117.0 build.162

My server is on the local network (not that it should matter for UI jank)

Scrolling just about anywhere on the app is incredibly slow. Only brief moments of 60fps, regularly under 5 with some artists if about a second.

https://youtu.be/mGZRz-91jRk

I noted that it is particularly bad on the map view. It locks up when loading and even after scrolling is super janky. It is so bad that it may be an additional issue but may be related.

https://youtu.be/cO0OYiwPaQI

I haven't seen any freezing it crashing yet though.

[AleXburnA]

@alextran1502 Oh that's great news! Could you share the link to the WIP PR or branch once ready? I am very looking forward to it 😃 thanks again for all the amazing work!

[alextran1502]

@AleXburnA it is a series of refactoring that have been going on. I am planning to work on the album sync mechanism this coming week

[Cohinem]

Not fixed yet as of 1.19.1

[mustermaxs]

I don't know if this problem has been solved or not. But I'm still encountering this problem. The app freezes up every couple of seconds for at least 7s. I only have about 9000 photos and videos in my account.

[AleXburnA]

We also still experience the issue on Android phones, it seems it's not yet fixed