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Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

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Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#51

Post by rhizome »

ainiriand wrote: post #8
dsr_ wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not throttling based on user-agent. It's just a bug that happens when the user-agent parser falls off a cliff when it exhausts the values that it knows about. A bug that Microsoft won't fix, because Linux is not supported.

But user-agent parsing should be blazing fast, a one-liner regexp or similar, isn't it?

It seems something more like:

    case @useragent
      when 'Windows'
        send file fast
      when 'OSX'
        send file fast
      else
        sleep 3600

Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#53

Post by aruggirello »

Spoom wrote: post #19
ainiriand wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throttling is the only thing I can think of. This is the New New Microsoft then, similar to the first.

"And sometimes there's a third, even deeper level, and that one is the same as the top surface one. Like with pie."

Like with onions.

Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#54

Post by untog »

mhluongo wrote: post #2

They can't be throttling based on user-agent... right? I thought this was the New Microsoft. Any other hypotheses?

> They can't be throttling based on user-agent... right?

It can be, but not for the motives many would assume. I can imagine them white-listing clients that they've thoroughly tested with advanced functionality, and blocking it for others.

I'm not for a second suggesting this is a wise course of action, but I also really don't think it's a cynical attempt to make Linux a less viable platform. It's just cover-your-ass behaviour for a corporate-focused product.

User agent sniffing is usually a bad shortcut for feature detection, and little more.

Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#56

Post by nkkollaw »

morinted wrote: post #9

Unhelpful catch-all responses that don't display a shred of effort or care are the bane of my customer support experiences. Nothing hurts my opinion of a company like being brushed off like a bug.

Definitely.

The guy would've probably gotten fired if he was honest: "that almost looks like it was done on purpose to force people to use Windows", but he could have avoided completely dismissing the guy.

For instance, by saying: "thanks for reporting this, I'll pass this to the tech team. In the meantime you can keep using your solution if it solves the problem for you".

It's probably hard for a huge company to give good tech support. It's not as if the support guy has any power to be helpful, they probably give him some copy and paste responses according to what the problem is.

The best tech support that I happened to use was Apple's. The guy actually seemed to care about my problem, and bypassed the protocol to help me out when I spilled coffee on my laptop.

Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#57

Post by ethbro »

0942v8653 wrote: post #36
TillE wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Not supported" is an acceptable first half of a response, but all you really have to add is "I'll pass this on to the tech team" and the tone changes entirely.

But if it's not supported, they can't pass it on to the tech team; that would be against policy. Changing policy to make companies support unsupported software is a hard sell.

This seems like a valid bug per the Reddit thread [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/60nj67/office_365_on...

Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#58

Post by colanderman »

simias wrote: post #37
morinted wrote: post #9

Unhelpful catch-all responses that don't display a shred of effort or care are the bane of my customer support experiences. Nothing hurts my opinion of a company like being brushed off like a bug.

I don't really see it that way. I don't think Microsoft would be expected to offer support for an operating system that's not officially supported. I could see only two ways this could've turned out, either "we're planning to support linux in a future version, we'll keep you updated when that happens" or exactly what we got here. If this is actually a bug then I think it would be rather inappropriate for the support…

Well if they want to play games with semantics, I'm pretty sure one could reproduce this bug on a Windows machine.

Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#60

Post by askmike »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #49
simias wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see it that way. I don't think Microsoft would be expected to offer support for an operating system that's not officially supported. I could see only two ways this could've turned out, either "we're planning to support linux in a future version, we'll keep you updated when that happens" or exactly what we got here. If this is actually a bug then I think it would be rather inappropriate for the support…

Obviously it works on Linux; the slow down is the direct result of OneDrive's User-Agent based code paths.

And what if some programmers are put unto fixing this, to realise the normal code path has a number of other bugs for linux? If you write web software you clearly define what you support and what you do not.

I've fallen into the "I know this browser is not supported, but everything works except for X" trap. Where you first spend a month fixing other bugs that also don't work, only to end up with a more complex QA dev process since you need to make sure all new features also work in this other browser or environment.

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