Nearly every meteor shower runs best in the dark hours after midnight. This is not a rule of thumb, it is geometry. Before midnight you stand on the trailing side of the Earth and meteors have to catch up to you from behind. After midnight your part of the planet has rotated to face the direction of travel, and now you meet the debris head on. The same physics that puts more bugs on the front windshield than the back glass puts more meteors in the pre dawn sky.
Why after midnight wins
The Earth moves along its orbit at about eighteen miles a second. The side of the planet pointed forward into that motion sweeps up the most dust, and that forward side is the one turning into sunrise. So the hours from roughly midnight to the first light of dawn sit under the windshield of the Earth, and that is where the count is highest. In the evening you are on the back glass, and you see fewer and slower streaks.
Two things that move the window
The radiant has to be up. Each shower appears to pour out of one patch of sky, and you see almost nothing until that patch has climbed above your horizon. Many radiants only rise high in the small hours, which stacks on top of the after midnight rule. The Moon is the other factor. A bright Moon in the sky drowns out the faint meteors, so the best nights are the ones where the Moon has set or is only a thin crescent. When a bright Moon is up, aim your watching for the stretch after it goes down.
The exact hour over your sky
The generic answer is after midnight, but your real window depends on your latitude, the date and when the Moon sets where you are. The live instrument takes your location and shows the sky as it stands now, so instead of guessing you can see when the radiant clears your horizon and when the Moon drops out of the way. That is the hour to set an alarm for.
Before you go out
Give your eyes a full twenty minutes in the dark before you judge the night, because they keep getting more sensitive the longer you stay out. Keep the phone dark or on a deep red screen, since one white screen resets all of it. Dress for twenty minutes colder than you think, lie back, and take in the widest patch of sky you can rather than staring at the radiant itself. The longest streaks appear well away from the radiant.
Set the alarm for the right hour, not a guess.
The best window is Moon set and radiant height lining up over your coordinates, and it is different every night and every place. Magna Earth works that out for your exact spot and sends you the hour, so you wake up for the peak and not for a sky the Moon has washed flat.
Get your peak hour, by location — from $14/mo