title: ESP32: BLE transmission speed is very slow
body: <p>I am trying to build an Android app that interfaces with the ESP32 using BLE. I am using the RxBluetoothKotlin library from Vincent Masselis for the Android side. For the ESP32 side, I am using the default Kolban libraries that are included in the Arduino IDE. My phone is a OnePlus 5T and my ESP32 is a MH ET Live ESP32DevKIT. My Android app can be found <a href="https://github.com/Amanoo/RxBluetoothKotlin/tree/master/demo-app" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>, and my ESP32 program <a href="https://github.com/Amanoo/RxBluetoothKotlin/tree/master/demo-app-esp32-companion" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>.</p>
  <p>The whole system works pretty much perfectly for me in terms of pure functionality. That is to say, every button does what it's supposed to do, and I get the exact behaviour I had expected to get. However, the communication itself is very slow. Around 200 bytes/second. My test button in the Android app requests a bunch of text data from the ESP32, and displays this in a dialog. It also lists a number which represents the time between request and reception in milliseconds. Using this, I get around 2 seconds for 440 bytes of data. When I send less data, the time decreases approximately linearly with data size. 40 bytes of data will take around 200ms, and 20 bytes or under typically takes less than 100ms.</p>
  <p>This seems rather slow to me. From what I understand, I should be able to at least get a few kilobytes per second. I have tried to check the speed using nRF Connect, but I get the same 2 seconds timespan for my data transfer. This suggests that the problem is not in my app, since I also have it with a completely different app. I also put the code in my main loop inside of callbacks instead (which I probably should have done in the first place), but this didn't change things at all. I have tried taking the microcontroller and my phone to a few different locations, hoping to eliminate interference. I have tried to mess with BLEDevice::setPower and BLEDevice::setMTU, as well as setting RxBluetoothGatt.requestMtu(500) on the Android side. Everything so far seems to have had little to no effect. The only thing that did anything, was adding the line &quot;pServer-&gt;updatePeerMTU(0,500);&quot; in my loop during the connection phase. This caused the first 23 bytes of data to be repeated whenever I pressed the test button in my app, and made the data transfer take about 3 seconds. If I'm lucky, I can get maybe a bit under 1.8 seconds for 440 bytes, but this is a very small change when I'm expecting an order of magnitude of difference, and might even be down to pure chance rather than anything I did.</p>
  <p>Does anyone have an idea of how to increase my transfer speed?</p>