ConnectStats Cache Management

ConnectStats downloads activity data from the web service of your choice, and then maintains a local cache. This is for speed, to allows for offline drilling of the data and minimise bandwidth usage.

When you do a refresh, ConnectStats will try to download the only summary information it needs to display a summary and when you try to open an activity details, it will then only download and cache these details. This allows for faster initial download and also minimise bandwidth usage as it only downloads what it needs once.

There are quite a few options to help manage the cache in the Settings Tab, under Current Profile. You can find information about creating profile here.

Delete Activities or Profile

Usually when you do a refresh of the activities in the app, it will try to detect if some activity were removed from the remote service and remove them from the local cache. It will also try to check if anything was changed on the remote service. But it only does that for the last 20 or so activities. If you have a lot of activities it would be too slow to check too many each time.

If you feel the cache is very inconsistent you can delete some activities from the local cache, which will force the app to download a fresh version. The 3 options when you select Delete Activities or Profile are:

  • Delete Profile: this will delete the whole profile, including associated settings and all the cached activities
  • Delete Some Activities: this will delete all the activities in the local cache from the most recent until the activity you have currently selected
  • Delete All Activities: this will delete all the activities in the local cache but preserve your profile settings

Note that all these functions only delete activities in the local cache, but never on the remote service

Compute Best for more old Activities

ConnectStats beside maintaining a cache of the activity data from the remote service, also store some of it’s own data. Specifically for now it maintains your best overall speed and heart rate for given distance or time. This is somewhat slow to calculate, so it only calculates it when you look at an activity. Given the data is more interesting when you look at it over longer period of time, this option lets you force a calculation over a set of older activities. This can be useful to get the graph in the summary stats page to account for more activity. It can be a bit slow, but it’s also safe to interrupt and restart. It will always compute about 15 activities worth of analysis. Note it will not force a download of the details of an activity but only analyses activities for which the details cache has been downloaded.

This can be useful if you have a lot of activities already downloaded and want to make sure the summary stats are takes everything into account.

Force Download Details

This option allows you to force the app to download details for 30 activities. As mentioned earlier, initially it only downloads in the cache summary information and the details information on demand (when you look at an activity). This allows you to force the download of many activities without opening them all by one. If you start the app when your history on the remote service is quite long, it lets you download and run the extra analysis.

Force Reload Old Activities

When you refresh, ConnectStats only checks changes and the summary for the 20 most recent activities. This option allows you to force the app to checks every activity in your history. It should then pick up changes on older activities as well as older activities deleted on the service.

View and Manage Cache

This will show you the break down of the files in the local cache and the space it takes on the disk. You can press on a category to clear the files of that type. But I don’t recommend you do that.

What the Summary Stats say about September

Looking at the summary stats September turned out a pretty good month for my running.

Looking at the fitness vs fatigue graph section corresponding to september, the line stayed pretty constant, showing I kept my training level pretty constant. Later in the month I pushed a bit more as the peak in fatigue shows.

Simulator_Screen_Shot_17_Oct_2015__21_12_12In the bottom graph, the thicker black line shows the best speed achieved for given distances in september. I achieved my best speed of the year for all distance between 6km and 13km. You can see that as the thicker black line for september is the minimum for the year, and I did quite significantly better in speed than august.

Simulator_Screen_Shot_17_Oct_2015__21_12_27Meanwhile the best heart rate profile shows that this was achieved without pushing the heart rate more than the other months. Actually, the september line (black thick line) stays quite below the max of the year for any duration. This is pretty satisfying: better speed without pushing  much more…

 

What’s new in ConnectStats 2.3

Universal Links

Now, it will be possible to directly open the app in a specific page from an article. It will make it easier for people to navigate to a corresponding page from a post or help on the web. For example this should open the summary page.

Force Touch

For those lucky iPhone 6s owners, you can have quick access to stats, refresh from the home page and you can have preview of an activity without opening it by pressing hard on the main activity list.

Cache Management

A few more options to manage the local cache, and an option to display an icon to quickly identify what activities were downloaded or not.