ridiculously late Pocket Queries

[+Kit Fox]

I have two pocket queries that I run every weekend, that seem to get emailed to me later every week. I already had to switch to my personal email because I no longer received my Groundspeak emails at Yahoo.

 

I've been a premium member since 04, and have never had these issues until now. Can anyone tell me why these delays are so bad?

 

2:23 pm PQ 780784.gpx

1:44 pm PQ 1630664.gpx

[+sbell111]

Did you get them on the day of the week that you had checked?

[Neos2]

Your time or Groundspeak time? Or are they the same?

Daylight savings time glitch?

[+kayak-cowboy]

I have run PQs in the past that NEVER showed up in my e-mail inbox. They all did generate and was NOT in any of my SPAM filters. Like I said this is a personal history.

[+Markwell]

I have run PQs in the past that NEVER showed up in my e-mail inbox. They all did generate and was NOT in any of my SPAM filters that I know of*. Like I said this is a personal history.

 

*Added

 

Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and other providers have throttled GC.com mail many times in the past. If that's the case, you'd never see them in your SPAM folders or anywhere. In cases like this, it's the problem of the e-mail provider that's bottlenecking these messages, not GC.com.

 

Back in the old days of mailed paychecks, if my office mailed my check and the mailman took his bags of mail and burned them in his basement, it's not my employer's fault, is it?

[Motorcycle_Mama]

I just enabled the check box on three of my saved PQs. They all ran within 1 minute of me checking the box and I received the email within 1 minute of them running.

 

But I seemed to have missed the part of the license agreement where we were guaranteed to get our PQs at some specific time of day. Can someone point out to me where that part is? Thanks.

[+Kit Fox]

I just enabled the check box on three of my saved PQs. They all ran within 1 minute of me checking the box and I received the email within 1 minute of them running.

 

But I seemed to have missed the part of the license agreement where we were guaranteed to get our PQs at some specific time of day. Can someone point out to me where that part is? Thanks.

 

To clarify, I did get the PQs on the listed day, but they used to get emailed to me early enough in the morning that I could go caching with the most recent data. Now i've had to use Saturday's PQs to hunt caches on Sundays. Things change, caches get disabled, get archived, or new caches are posted. Having yesterdays Query doesn't keep me up to date.

 

Having to waste time checking the status of all 500 caches in the query is out of the question.

Edited March 10, 2008 by Kit Fox

[+sTeamTraen]

I guess more or less everyone would like their PQs to arrive at 7am. Trouble is, the shared server resources to run them aren't - by definition - all available at once.

 

You could perhaps comfort yourself with the idea that, whereas up to now you've been the one getting your PQs at a perfect time to peruse over breakfast before setting out, now it's somebody else's turn. You'll just have to go caching with day-old data for a while, until your turn comes round again in the karma queue.

 

Of course, platinum members get to choose when their PQs run, and breakfast is thrown in. With juice and coffee.

[Motorcycle_Mama]

Yeah, and there's a big difference between saying that they used to run earlier and that you'd LIKE them to run earlier and saying that having them arrive when they do (which is within the parameters set by the site) is UNACCEPTABLE.

[+alexrudd]

Copy them to new queries, which should throw them to the top of the heap for a bit.

 

That's pretty much the only answer that's been given for as long as I can remember.

[+StarBrand]

Run them on Fridays so you are ready to head out first thing on Saturday even if they arrive late in the day. 12 to 24 hours of old data should never be all that bad.

[+Kit Fox]

Run them on Fridays so you are ready to head out first thing on Saturday even if they arrive late in the day. 12 to 24 hours of old data should never be all that bad.

 

What i've ended up doing is requesting these PQs on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday then using the query from the day before. I usually get the new query while i'm out caching.

[O-Mega]

I just enabled the check box on three of my saved PQs. They all ran within 1 minute of me checking the box and I received the email within 1 minute of them running.

 

But I seemed to have missed the part of the license agreement where we were guaranteed to get our PQs at some specific time of day. Can someone point out to me where that part is? Thanks.

 

What are your queries setup like? Mine have been sent that quick when they were copied or new but not the saved ones.

 

Yeah, and there's a big difference between saying that they used to run earlier and that you'd LIKE them to run earlier and saying that having them arrive when they do (which is within the parameters set by the site) is UNACCEPTABLE.

 

Having the expectation that PQs be sent earlier in a que isn't asking too much IMHO. Seeing as there was enough foresight to place the forums on a different server to lessen the impact on the geocache server would it not be prudent to have separate servers do the queries as well?

 

I sure would like to see a bandwidth graph on the difference between servers, because I see many users with umpteen different posts on the forums with just a few finds and vice versa.

[+Team GPSaxophone]

Things change, caches get disabled, get archived, or new caches are posted. Having yesterdays Query doesn't keep me up to date.

Even if you could get real-time cache data while in the field (you can with a web-enabled phone, actually), what if the owner just hasn't updated their cache or the last person to visit hadn't logged yet? What if no one knows that the cache was muggled since the last log? You're always going to have old data of some sort.

 

Even with a web-enabled phone, I run my PQ's the day before I'm going caching. If a new cache pops up between then and the time I leave, I get an email notification and can send that particular cache to my GPSr.

[+Kryten]

If you are running the same query every week then it is being given a lower and lower priority each time it runs. Try editing something in the query, save the new version, then edit back to the way it was before. You will find that the system now consders it to be "new" and so will give it a much higher priority. Doing this about once every six weeks keeps the query arrival time in the early morning.

[+Markwell]

Run them on Fridays so you are ready to head out first thing on Saturday even if they arrive late in the day. 12 to 24 hours of old data should never be all that bad.

 

What i've ended up doing is requesting these PQs on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday then using the query from the day before. I usually get the new query while i'm out caching.

 

Well there's your problem.

 

Queries are set to run in order based on how recently they ran. Does the Friday one run early in the day? I bet if you dropped the Friday the Saturday one would run earlier. Even if you dropped the Sunday one, the next Friday one would run earlier.

[+Kit Fox]

Run them on Fridays so you are ready to head out first thing on Saturday even if they arrive late in the day. 12 to 24 hours of old data should never be all that bad.

 

What i've ended up doing is requesting these PQs on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday then using the query from the day before. I usually get the new query while i'm out caching.

 

Well there's your problem.

 

Queries are set to run in order based on how recently they ran. Does the Friday one run early in the day? I bet if you dropped the Friday the Saturday one would run earlier. Even if you dropped the Sunday one, the next Friday one would run earlier.

 

I'll change my queries to run on Thursday, Saturday, then Sunday.

 

In response to what Sax posted, i'm not obsessed with the absolute newest PQs per se, but I have noticed that most of the new caches in my area get posted on the weekend. Having to go through a list of caches manually is impractical because my caching window of opportunity is quite short.

[+sTeamTraen]

I'll change my queries to run on Thursday, Saturday, then Sunday.

 

Even better is probably to not set them to run automatically at all. When I need the latest unfound caches near me I just click on the box in the grid to run the PQ today, and by the time I've fired up GSAK and walked to the coffee pot and back, the PQ is in my mailbox. It takes - literally - a minute or so. Having them run automatically feels comforting (I used to do it) but probably ends up costing you more time and frustration because of the issue which people have mentioned of the recently-run ones going back in the queue.

[+sbell111]

Run them on Fridays so you are ready to head out first thing on Saturday even if they arrive late in the day. 12 to 24 hours of old data should never be all that bad.

What i've ended up doing is requesting these PQs on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday then using the query from the day before. I usually get the new query while i'm out caching.

If you are using the same PQ for all three days, that is why they keep running later and later. Since they were run the day prior, they are not high on the server's priority. There are a few things you can do to get them quicker. If you absolutely 'need' new data on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, you can set up individual queries to run on each of these days. Since the queries would only run once per week, they will have higher priority. You could also not schedule your queries and run them as needed. That way, you are nearly guaranteed to have perfectly fresh data within a few minutes of when you request it. Finally, you could do what I do. I run my PQs twice a week; on Mondays and Thursdays. I run them twice only because I wanted to 'collect' more logs. I don't stress about not having every single log and I have become perfectly fine with not having absolutely fresh data, so it being a couple days old doesn't bug me. The way I look at it, if I am out caching on the weekend, and I don't have the info on a cache that was listed in teh last day or so, I'll have it next week. The cache will still be new to me.

Having the expectation that PQs be sent earlier in a que isn't asking too much IMHO. Seeing as there was enough foresight to place the forums on a different server to lessen the impact on the geocache server would it not be prudent to have separate servers do the queries as well?

How many separate PQ servers would be enough? I think that the magic number would be enough servers to run all scheduled PQs in teh day that they were requested. I don't think that it would be a good business decision to buy enough PQ servers to run all of the scheduled PQs before any of us wake up for a day of caching and then sit idle for the rest of the day, which is kind of what is being requested.

 

The way that priority is given to scheduled PQs based on when they were last generated makes sense. This way, if all queries don't get run, the people who didn't get theirs can use the 'nearly perfectly fresh' query that they received the prior day.