Field report · · The 408
A picture made every TV notification time out at 20 seconds. Without it: 0.2.
The house sends alerts to the TVs as small on-screen notices. With a picture attached, every request hung for 20 seconds and timed out. The same notice with no picture came back in 0.2 seconds. If an integration of yours is slow or flaky, this is the cheapest test to run first.
What happened
Smaller pictures, same failure
The first guess was size, because the TV’s error text mentions a 100 KB limit. So the icon got smaller, tested at 20, 13, 6 and 3 KB, plus a PNG in case the format mattered. Every one hung for the full 20 seconds.
Then the icon came off entirely. The TV answered at once.
Size was never the variable. The picture being there at all was.
Why
The error message described a limit the request never reached
Every icon was well under 100 KB, so the limit in the error text couldn’t have been the reason. On these TVs a notice with an icon simply never gets an answer. The fix is a design rule, not a setting: TV notices are text only, and pictures go to the phone and the dashboard, where they work.
Where this stops: two webOS TVs on one firmware line, measured in September 2026. Other models or firmware may accept icons; test before you rely on either answer.
The rule
Remove it before you resize it
- Test whether the extra matters before you tune it.Send the request with the attachment, then without it. Only tune its size if presence isn’t the problem.
- Treat limits in error text as a hint, not a diagnosis.A limit you’re nowhere near can’t explain a failure.
- Write down what doesn’t work.“Text only” is now in the house’s notes, so nobody spends another afternoon shrinking icons.
Do this Monday
One step before lunch
- Take your slowest or flakiest integration, send it the smallest request it accepts, then add back one thing at a time until it breaks.
What’s in your slowest request that it doesn’t need?