Zwift updates really suck
 

why does zwift update at teh most inconvenient times?

i rarely do events but i found one that i really wanted to do yesterday. a race up the alpe. turn on the pc, fire up zwift and am greeted with an update. weird, it forced me to do this just last week. zwift takes long enough to start as it is but this just exacerbated things. i missed the event. pretty disappointed, and i noticed nothing different. wish they could figure out how to defer the updates.

i went up the alpe anyway and was disappointed too, took 65 minutes. my second over 60. pretty sure the race would have pushed me harder.

Zwift updates rarely take me more than a minute. Old hardware?

why, yes it is old hardware, but not ancient. and certainly no excuse for shoddy software. zwift is the biggest pig software i use as a customer.

Yeah, it's almost bad enough to get me to go complain on their forums. If I'm not riding indoors a lot, it's every ride. It seems to get stuck scrolling the splash screen after they apply the update most times. This last update didn't even require admin privileges, so it probably could have been deferred. But after I gave it a few minutes, I killed the program, restarted, and it was normal. So they were stuck. I wonder if there is a secret diagnostics output. Progress bars showing something is complete when it's not is a pet peeve of mine.

It's not exactly a compute-intensive task. I have a ssd on my admittedly old system, and they certainly aren't taxing my cpu. If I had a real keyboard on that system I would check to see if they were using any resources. But I feel confident they aren't.

When I want to do an event I always make sure to login early. Need maybe around 10-20 mins of warm-up before the actual event starts, after all.

Unless it's an absolutely necessary update, they should at least give an "Install Now" or "Remind me Later" option for the updates. Can't be that hard to implement.

No MMO (which, for all practical purposes, Zwift falls squarely in) that I am aware of allows mismatched clients to run together due to potential differences in performance and behavior.

Now you don't have to quit to save your ride, so you never have to do updates, just don't quit :)
I'm a little surprised there aren't more people riding around off the road than there used to be because of that.

I usually flip the computer on and run Zwift about thirty minutes before an event. Never had any update take more than 10 minutes and most considerable less than that. Zwift startup takes another few minutes or so, by the time I return with water bottles and snacks it’s usually ready to go.

We're all different, but if I had to budget 30 minutes before every ride for zwift to update, I would never ride. I go down to the basement, and I'm usually riding within 5 minutes.

Unless they are patching security holes, which I suppose is possible given their lackadaisical approach to programming, I think they should limit updates to significantly less often than they do now.

once a month at a prescribed time would be a smart thing to do. i never know when they are coming and they seem to come at an inopportune time.

I guess I’m just old and slow. Takes me at least 5 minutes to find my bike shorts. 😂

Zwift almost always updates iOS a few days to a week after PC/Android updates. At least they did last year.

For events like races, I like to plan enough time for a pre-race bio break or two.

I wonder how that works out with races... I hope they have some sort of version checking going on, otherwise if there are any changes in the game physics or course layout that may give an unfair advantage to one over the other. After all, as unterhausen has observed before, if there is a course layout mismatch you will see riders going off course and riding on a different track.

After getting burned a couple times with too-short warmups before races - and then having to switch to using a OLDER laptop when the HDMI socket on my main laptop started cutting out - I've developed a routine where FIRST I launch Zwift, THEN set the bike up on the trainer, THEN fill a water bottle and add ice, THEN get changed to ride.

Zwift Corollary to Murphy's Law means that the less time you allow yourself before an event, the larger the update that needs to install.

immediately after i get out of my car i walk to the laptop and turn it on. it is slow to start so i get everything in the house then come back out to the garage and launch zwift.

just yesterday though i swapped the old laptop for a newer model, even has a SSD. faster sure but what i was really happy with was the far better graphics. i'm seeing detail i never saw before like bugs around the lights in the forest. nice touch. now if they can just fix the grade profile in the surrey hills...

Oh you mean how it turns into a black box if you're more than a third of the way up Box Hill? I hate that. It's been years at this point, so obviously a low priority.

Yeah, that’s about what I do. First connect and boot laptop, launch Zwift, then fill any water bottles and add electrolytes, then put on the indoor cycling costume and HRM. Then I boot into the event, check the Bluetooth controlled fans, and make a few stupid comments in the chat like “Go easy on me today boys” while warming up. If I start the process at t~30min I can get a 15-20minute warm up before everyone goes like heck out of the gate. The final standing, if that matters at all to you, is really dependent on lining up early and going really hard in the few minutes for big races/events.

you wear a cycling costume? you mean like superman or batman?

sorry...just pulling your cape.

I generally start 45 minutes or more before the race so that I can get all booted up, load zwift, get dressed, go back and get the water bottles I forgot to bring into the basement, join the event right at 29:58 before the race so I can get into the front row, log out and back in again (or just end to go back to the main screen now), hit the restroom for the bio break, sign on to dischord to see if any teammates are racing with me, hop on to a pace partner to warm up until 5:00 before the start of the race, then go back to the pen (and maybe make one last last-minute run to the restroom for another bio break). Very complicated, but rituals work for me.

Seems to me that "graphic intensive" implies "hardware intensive" these days, and we're now so used to these SaaS-y client-server architectures that we're just going to have to stay current on the machines we want to use. I can't imagine what it takes to make thousands of endpoints (user connections) play nicely together in 3D space for drafting, passing, and generally not falling apart visually with the complex dynamics. Frankly, it's a miracle that it works at all... with support for Win, MacOS, iOS,... I'm in the software biz and I'm awed, flukes, bugs, warts and all.

Something about the times when I can Zwift - between 5 and 7:30 PM PDT on weekdays - seems to make the fields really small often fewer than a dozen. This means it almost doesn't matter how close to the start I get in the starting pen. It also means all the podium finishes I've managed don't really mean much. But I have fun.