nextcloud / nextcloud/spreed

Improve amount of signaling messages when joining a call

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bug feature: signaling 📶 performance 🚀
Dominant language
PHP
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Description

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Steps to reproduce

  1. Have an ongoing call with about 55 participants
  2. Join the call
Expected behaviour

You receive a reasonable amount of signaling messages

Actual behaviour

In the first 26s you receive around 1070 signaling messages.

Details

Received signaling messages by type:

   1         type = answer;
  16         type = offer;
   1         type = answer;
 695         type = mute;
 351         type = nickChanged;
  16         type = offer;
  7          type = unmute;

https://github.com/nextcloud/spreed/pull/4181 implemented a mechanism to make sure that the initial status of all participants is actually received, which results in a high amount of signaling messages in the first 30s after joining a call. Additionally to those signaling message, some messages are also send/received via the webrtc data channel (nickChanged for example).

Some ideas
  • Check that the messages from https://github.com/nextcloud/spreed/pull/4181 are sent only to the newly joined participant
  • Only send speaking/speakingStopped messages through data channel, use signaling for everything else (only possible after all clients support all signaling message types)
  • Ignore data channel messages client side, when the type is supported as a signaling message
  • Introduce some kind of state message where nickChanged, mute (audio/video) and raisedHand are combined into one single message
  • According to https://github.com/nextcloud/spreed/pull/4181 it is not possible to detect when to send the initial state to a newly joined participant. We could think about letting the newly joined participant request the state, this way it would be 1 message to all (the new participant requesting the state) and 1 message from each participant to the new participant (the actual state), so 56 messages in total.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reviewing the signaling changes in pull request #4181 and tracing how initial participant state and WebRTC data-channel messages are handled when joining a call. Done means preserving the required participant state while substantially reducing the signaling messages received during the first 30 seconds.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
javascript
Domain
audio-video-rtc, performance
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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