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scripts/soak_fleet.py asks each phone’s helper the same read-only questions in a loop and tells you how long each answer took and how often it failed. Run it before you rely on a row of phones, after you add a hub or a phone, and after an iOS update. It sends GET requests only. It sends no tap, swipe or key, creates no session and never unlocks a phone. It stops reading a phone the moment its owner starts using it (Your iPhone stays yours).

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Run it

Try it without a phone first. The built-in fake fleet needs no cable and no mobster serve:
On real phones, name each phone’s helper address, or let it list the phones of a running mobster serve:
It prints a table:
--serve can’t see a phone’s address: the first phone is on 8100, and the others on 8101, 8102 and up in the order the server lists them. If you forgot a phone, pass --phone for each one. The lock is a directory made with mkdir before the first read. A held lock stops the run, and the script removes the directory only if it made it.

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Run it on more phones

  1. Connect each phone with its own cable. A powered USB hub works; plug the hub into the Mac directly, not through a keyboard or a display. Each phone has to be set up in Mobster once: Adding and setting up a device.
  2. Every phone gets WebDriverAgent on port 8100 plus its slot and live view on 9100 plus its slot (Ports). mobster devices lists them.
  3. Unlock every phone and set Auto-Lock to Never for the run, so a locked screen isn’t counted as a failure. Put them down: an owner who picks one up ends that phone’s run, which the report shows as stopped: owner_active.
  4. Start with 5 phones for 5 minutes. Then add phones until the p99 of screenshot or source rises or a failure rate leaves 0%: that is this Mac’s limit with this hub. Each phone’s reads run on their own thread, so the load on the Mac and the hub is what you are measuring.
  5. Record: what you ran (flags, duration, interval), the Mac and hub, the phones’ models and iOS versions, the date, and the table. Keep the JSON with it.
To publish a result, put the table in a docs page or a pull request with those five facts, dated. Say what a number was measured on; don’t round a p99 down.

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What the numbers mean

  • A failure is a timeout or an error from the helper, with the bound in mobile_agent/wda_timeouts.py: 3 s for the first three steps, 10 s for the others. The error names are in the JSON under errors.
  • A rising screenshot p99 with a flat locked p99 means the USB link or the phone is busy, not the helper.
  • Watchdog restarts is how many times Mobster restarted a helper during the run (When the helper stops answering). Any restart during a soak run is worth reading the helper’s log for.

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Measured

Nothing here has been measured on more than one phone yet. The fake fleet’s numbers are a model of the script, not of a phone.