"Online since" always reports short times, but devices remain up

I have at least a half dozen ESP8266 and ESP32 devices connected to my router, one of which has been running for over 5 years. They never seem to go down. However, when I check the “online since” feature on in Blynk, the time reported is rarely more than a few minutes previous. I’ll look at 11:30am, and it will say “Online since 11:23am.”

If my devices were truly going offline every few minutes, I’d expect to occasionally find one in an “Offline” state, but that’s not the case. Any idea what I’m witnessing here? Failure of the devices to “phone home” to the Blynk servers frequently enough? An overtaxed router, struggling to serve roughly 20 connections?

Do I even need to be concerned, as long as all devices remain usable?

Even i face the same issue. I have few 8266 installed. I have an UPS, so there is no point of reboots. Even for the internet they have there own UPS which keep the internet running for another 8hrs. But whenever i check the status of the devices it shows today’s date and time.

@chrome1000 @Madhukesh do you use a local server? If so you can check the logs with trace mode enabled that will give you 100% correct answer.

I’d expect to occasionally find one in an “Offline” state, but that’s not the case. Any idea what I’m witnessing here?

Usually devices are rebooted very quickly, within 1 millisecond (in the local network), so you won’t see it. What server do you use?

An overtaxed router, struggling to serve roughly 20 connections?

Actually could be a case. My router behaves very badly when a number of active connections comes to 10. So this is a possible reason as well.

One more idea. In Blynk 1.0 we always show an “device is connected” message when a new connection is established. So, you can open the app and monitor it for 10-20 minutes and check if you see those messages. If yes - this is 100% actual reconnect happening.

I have faced the same issue on both local as well as cloud server. I have seen devices which are online straight for 1week. But never seen a device continuously connected for months… there will definitely be reconnections happening every now and then🙄.

This ‘device is connected’ message can also be disabled in the project’s settings - check for the ‘notification off’ switch there.

That’s expected for the cloud message. There are 10 different routers at least for you message that goes from the hardware to the cloud. There is no chance they will keep the connection open for so long.

In case of the local server you can check the logs. It will show the reason of the disconnect.

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@Dmitriy I use the Blynk cloud server. Maybe it’s time to build a local one. :slight_smile: