bootron

So I think it's safe to say we have gotten the Waymarking site RAM issues under control. We've had 4 straight days with no morning issues so I have made a few new adjustments to the back end code to try and speed up the page load times. So far it seems to be pretty snappy. If things go back to a bad place I'll re-adjust in a day or so. Thanks, bootron

We have been seeing some slowdown issues and have been hitting some resource limits at around 7-9AM PST each day for the past several weeks. It seems to be the only time that this happens, we are trying to get to the bottom of what is causing it. We don't believe this is related to the previous problems that we had been seeing over the past several months.

The Geocaching database had a minor failure a few minutes ago. Waymarking still shares account data with the Geocaching website and so when Geocaching goes down, often Waymarking will see consequences as well. This has always been the case. It is not related to the issues we have been seeing in the past couple weeks. As far as I can tell there are no major issues happening to the Waymarking site right now and you should be able to use the site as before. Bootron

One additional thing to note is that we had to slow down the home page load time a bit by doing some of our fixes. This is a known issue at this point, and we will try to tweak the settings in the upcoming days to make it a bit more responsive. It's a trade-off at this point, between using up server and database resources, but we will try to find the right balance. Also, there appears to be a memory leak in the code somewhere (this has always been there, it's not new), and as a result we may have to reset the server from time to time until we can stamp it out for good. If we do reset the site, it should only be down for a minute or two at a time.

Been getting a lot of error messages today and the site is EXTREMELY slow. Yesterday, it was iffy. It was loading at a slow, but not too ridiculously slow. Today, it's been very slow and the site has just crashed for the 3rd time today that I know of. I wonder if this will ever be fixed. My photos from summer trips/vacations are back piling so much right now that I don't want to go anywhere and waste more space/time/energy to post waymarks that may never get published. So at about 16:30 PM PST we made some significant changes to the Waymarking codebase and also the servers themselves that we think will put the site back into a usable state for the forseeable future. I won't guarantee that it will be the end all be all solution to all our troubles, but we do think we have figured out the root causes of the past week's memory troubles. The code base still has its problems and we aren't pretending to have fixed many of the issues that you have seen over the years, but the core functionality should be generally back in order now. We'll keep a close eye on the site metrics this weekend and will be checking in to the forums to make sure that this is, in fact, the case. Bootron

Read through this thread and you'll see that we have commented about what is going on with the site right now on several occasions. We do understand your frustration and are working to get this problem stabilized. Bootron

Yep...I'm having the same problem...this is getting very frustrating. Okay good. Glad it's not my computer. It worked for about a half hour then the states stopped showing up. Tried to save it on my computer, then go back on my phone. That worked as well, but only for a few minutes. Now I can't even get the drop down menu on my phone. We can see the server is having a few troubles this morning. I'm looking into this right now and will do my best to clear it up asap. We've added some additional logging to help diagnose issues better. I'll post again when we have things cleared up.

Released a bug fix this evening that should fix this error.

Just deployed a fix that should fix this issue.

I am still getting some errors on occasion as well. Will continue working tomorrow to get this back into working condition.

I have released another fix that will hopefully remove all the "ambiguous control" errors. Also, a few more things: 1. As I have mentioned in an earlier post, we have added a second server to the Waymarking site and there obviously have been some undesired effects as a result. We have been working to fix these problems as best as we can with the limited resources that we are devoting to the site at this time. 2. It is true that Groundspeak has de-prioritized the Waymarking website as compared to our other sites (also obvious, I'm sure). At this point we are committed to keeping it up and functioning, but are not adding new features or spending significant time maintaining the site. In making this decision (which frankly happened years ago) we had a couple options: A] shut down the site altogether, or B] keep the site up and running with limited support. Since there continues to be a group of dedicated Waymarkers that use the site regularly, we have decided that option B is the best one for now. 3. We don't know what the future of Waymarking will be. We haven't made any decisions and are looking at various options. For now, we are continuing to do what we've done for the past several years, which is to leave the site up and running and do what we can to keep it functioning as is. Bootron

As you all have noticed, we've been having some lingering issues with our Waymarking server upgrade. This morning we had a few new headaches that popped up and at least one of the bugs I thought I had fixed yesterday was still showing up. That bug is now fixed and the home page issues that were popping up earlier should now be resolved. We are aware of a few other issues, like the broken stats image on the profile page, but we are working to get those issues resolved as well. I'll try to keep you updated as they get fixed. Thanks, bootron

These issues should now be fixed. We just added another server to the pool and had messed up a couple of the settings. I've fixed them and things should be back in order. Specifically: the scoring_schema thing shouldn't be an issue any longer the bubble category image on the maps should be displayed properly now the country/state dropdowns should be working again. bootron

We are aware that Waymarking is experiencing downtime pretty frequently in the past few days. It appears to be tied to some issues with the database, which is also used by other projects in the Groundspeak universe. It's a tricky thing to track down when it is sporadic like this, we are working on diagnosing the problem right now and will hopefully have a solution for it soon. Sorry for the inconvenience. Bootron

Google has deprecated their V2 maps as of yesterday. We are still using V2 on the Waymarking site, and so this obviously is causing some issues for us. We were under the impression that V2 was still going to work when they made this switchover, because they supposedly were going to wrap the functionality up underneath the covers, but clearly this is not exactly the case. A few additional features on our website are now breaking as a result, because google no longer is supporting them. Anyway, to make a long story short, we are in the process of upgrading our maps to V3 and will hopefully have a fix in a day or two. Sorry for the inconvenience. bootron

Looking into these today. Thanks, Bootron

Our notification server crashed yesterday and it's now slogging through all the thousands of emails that are backed up in the queue. You should see the missing notifications come to you within the next couple of hours. bootron

It looks like the ISBN variable is the culprit. We do a call to Amazon to create a link to the book automatically, and somehow that call is no longer working properly. I've fixed the issue in the code, but unfortunately we will have to wait until our next release (in 7-10 days) before the problem will be completely fixed on the live site. I'll see if it's possible to expedite the process, but it may not be feasible at this point. For the record, if you remove the ISBN variable, it will make the waymarks work again, but will lose all the ISBN data for all the other waymarks in this category, so I don't recommend doing that. Sorry for the frustration, Bootron

These will be removed in a coming hotfix.

If you don't mind, could you send one of these images to contact@geocaching.com c/o bootron, so we can use it to test our image service? bootron

The problem queries have now finished.

You have to use a 3rd party aggregator to read the feeds. It won't show anything but xml if you just click the links. On our home page post we give an explanation of how to utilize the feeds.

We have now found the root cause of this error. If I'm not mistaken you won't be seeing this problem again.

It's a good suggestion. I'll hopefully get to this soon.

Right now you can enter a WMxxxxvalue in the search field for the directory. Make sure the "waymarks" option is checked. It will return the waymark you are asking for.