discoveryd Is Still Buggy
I started reporting these issues early in the Yosemite beta release and provided tons of documentation to Apple engineering. It was frustrating to have a Mac that lost its network connection every few days because the network interfaces were disabled while waking from sleep (and there was no way to disable this new “feature”.)
Regardless of the many issues people were reporting with
discoveryd, Apple went ahead and released it anyway. As a result, this piece of software is responsible for a large portion of the thousand cuts. Personally, I’ve wasted many hours just trying to keep my devices talking to each other. Macs that used to go months between restarts were being rebooted weekly. The situation is so bad that I actually feel good when I can just killdiscoverydand toggle the network interface to get back to work.[…]
[This] code is all over the place. It’s in use by iOS, OS X and presumably whatever is running on the Apple Watch. As such, any one of those devices can poison Bonjour for everything else on your network.
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You also can’t rely on software updates to fix everything: I have both an Airport Express and Apple TV that are no longer receiving fixes. Having to buy new hardware because of crappy software adds insult to injury.
Yosemite is now 6 months old, these bugs still aren’t fixed, and it feels like they probably won’t be fixed anytime soon. Yosemite is probably in minimal-maintenance mode as primary resources have likely moved on to headlining features for 10.11. This is what’s so frustrating about today’s Apple: if a bug persists past the early beta stages of its introduction, it rarely ever gets fixed. They’re too busy working on the new to fix the old.
I used to be proud to show off what the Apple ecosystem could do, throwing photos and videos to my AppleTV. Dragging and dropping files between computers with zero configuration. Friends and family were always amazed that it just worked. Now it’s just an embarrassment.
I haven’t had any networking issues since 10.10.3, and I know that update fixed WiFi bugs for a lot of people that I know. But this is still happening for an alarming number of people. In an era where Apple is rapidly pushing for a cable-free experience, this is, frankly, unacceptable.
Marcus Müller (via Nat!):
While I’m still using Apple’s OSX 10.9.x as my workstation OS of choice, this is mostly due to the fact that it’s (still) better suited for my needs than the alternatives. I didn’t upgrade to OSX 10.10, however. OSX 10.10 IMO looks horrible and doesn’t offer anything I’d really need or want as a user, but instead breaks compatibility with hardware I own and use everyday.
Previously: Why DNS in OS X 10.10 Is Broken, Apple’s Software Quality, Continued.
3 Comments RSS · Twitter
I finally just switched to Yosemite 2 days ago. I had a very unstable network connection, and it seems better now after restarting the Time Capsule that we have on the network (it's a 4 or 5 year old model that's otherwise been really reliable). I still feel like there are latency issues sometimes, where a web page or a download takes longer than it should before starting to load. Sigh.
It's interesting to read that the bug is more likely to hit users with many Apple devices on their network... You'd think this is typically the situation that Apple itself would be dog-fooding the most.
[…] Apple’s video ecosystem right now. My Apple TV 3’s networking remains buggy since the discoveryd fiasco and will likely never get an update. Apple didn’t even bother supporting it with iOS […]
