@t0lbert I replied on Reddit too
So ext3 doesn’t want to flash the screen as events come from the default calendar, which could have multiple urls configured,
So it draws the calendar on a (configurable) refresh interval (default 10 minutes).
But you dont want to wait 10 minutes for the first draw,
So there is a config parm, waitFetch (default 5 seconds)
After waitFetch, it will draw cal with all events that have arrived (maybe none), then wait refreshInterval to draw the next
You can lengthen waitFetch… side effect nothing will be drawn til waitFetch expires
If you use pm2 to start MagicMirror, then its log has timestamps on the log entries, so you can see how long it takes to get the first events broadcast.
pm2 logs —lines=xxxx
xxxx is the number of most recent lines of output, 15 default
from a log on my system
[2025-11-30 10:24:52.516] [LOG] Launching application.
[2025-11-30 10:24:53.514] [LOG] Create new calendarfetcher for url: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical
[2025-11-30 10:24:53.638] [LOG] Create new calendarfetcher for url: https://ics.calendarlabs.com
...
[2025-11-30 10:24:53.901] [INFO] Calendar-Fetcher: Broadcasting 1 events from https://ics.calendarlabs.com
[2025-11-30 10:24:54.606] [INFO] Calendar-Fetcher: Broadcasting 162 events from https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical
calendarlabs fetch and process took
10:24:53.901
-10:24:53.638
----------263 miliiseconds
google fetch and process took
10:24:54.606
-10:24:53.514
--------1.092 seconds
IF BOTH of those are over waitFetch (default 5000) ,
then the calendar on MM will be empty until Ext3 refreshInterval expires (default 10 minutes),
doc says 30 minutes, code says 10 minutes
Google sends the whole calendar since its creation, could be thousands of events in the past