+Olar Posted August 27, 2003 Share Posted August 27, 2003 There have been numerous discussion threads and posts recently regarding PQ's not arriving either on time or not at all. It appears a large majority of the complaints involve cachers who have their PQ's set-up for daily delivery or at the least multiple times per week. I suspect a message is being sent out here and it is being missed. I can't find it at the moment but recently Jeremy explained the queuing system and which ones would receive priority and which ones would go to the back of the line and wait for others to be completed. If I'm not mistaken a daily PQ did not have much priority attached to it whereas a weekly, bi-weekly, etc. were favored. I think that this can be substantiated by my own three personal PQ's (low file numbers) which are delivered week-in and week-out at approximately 2 AM PST every Friday without fail and a fourth (higher file number) 7 hours later. I don't think that a 24-hour day is enough time to handle the sheer volume the server is asked to process. Are we asking too much of it? Do we really need those daily reports? Question for computer experts: If all daily PQ's were changed to 3 or 4 times per week would the delivery time be reduced proportionately? Cheers, Olar "You are only young once but you can stay immature forever" Link to comment
+mtn-man Posted August 28, 2003 Share Posted August 28, 2003 quote:Originally posted by Olar:Do we really need those daily reports? I am amazed that people get daily queries in a way. If they are small and only request new caches in the last 24 hours then I guess that makes some sense. I too only have one coming in each week regularly. It is a radial search from my home town and has 460 caches. It gets rid of the ones I found last week and I then update my GPS and my PDA. It is about 2 MB. I cannot imaging getting that thing every day. Link to comment
+rickrich Posted August 29, 2003 Share Posted August 29, 2003 We got burned too many times seeking caches that had been plundered or archived, all because our PQ data was a week old. I switched to daily PQs to avoid this problem. BTW, PQs of caches new in the last 24 hours are pretty much useless for going after an FTF, at least around here. By the time the PQ arrives, the cache will have already been found. Unless you use the trick to move it to the head of the queue. But widespread abuse of the trick will eventually ruin that method. For those of us who use Linux and procmail to automatically process the PQs as they come in, the ideal situation would be if we got a full PQ once a week, followed by just the diffs (deltas) from the full PQ as they arise. The deltas are much smaller. Deltas sent every hour or so would be second best. A full PQ runs around 2MB for my area, but a week of deltas averages about 200KB. So instead of sending 7*2MB = 14MB per week, gc.com could be sending a grand total of just 2.2MB per week, and the data would be fresher. -Rick Link to comment
+fizzymagic Posted August 30, 2003 Share Posted August 30, 2003 quote:Originally posted by Olar:I don't think that a 24-hour day is enough time to handle the sheer volume the server is asked to process. Are we asking too much of it? Do we really need those daily reports? I'd be willing to bet that the load on the database server from PQs is tiny compared to the load from other geocaching.com activities. And if it's not, then it's not designed properly. And yes, I do need daily PQs. If it were possible to get individual cache information in GPX format they wouldn't be necessary, but since it isn't, I rely on them. Link to comment
+Lone Duck Posted August 30, 2003 Share Posted August 30, 2003 quote:Originally posted by rickrich:For those of us who use Linux and procmail to automatically process the PQs as they come in, the ideal situation would be if we got a full PQ once a week, followed by just the diffs (deltas) from the full PQ as they arise. The deltas are much smaller. Deltas sent every hour or so would be second best. I think that you could set up a daily PQ to give you only the new caches that are in your area. Then you can merge the results into your weekly PQ using Watcher. That Quack Cacher: Lone Duck When you don't know where you're going, every road will take you there. Link to comment
MOCKBA Posted September 3, 2003 Share Posted September 3, 2003 I am kind of puzzled by all this PQ business, perhaps the oldtimers can help me with what it can and can't do - can it look for never-found-by-anybody caches? What about the ones not found since a certain date? Hunting virgin / forgotten caches is certainly a big part of this game! - can it look for caches which have your (or somebody else's) not-found entries? Comment entries? Wouldn't you want to know if someone was successfull after you've run out of luck? - can you look for caches within a certain multilateral shape only? I'd love to exclude urban caches from my searches... - what are PQ capabilities for searching BMs? Link to comment
+trippy1976 Posted September 5, 2003 Share Posted September 5, 2003 If there were a way to get PQs on demand I would reduce my frequency to only have Monday and Friday deliveries... going into and out of the weekend when I do most of my caching. However, if I want an update on Wed. for some reason... I'm SOL more than likely for up to many hours to get an update due to the queuing process. So... I just get them everyday, but only the GPX file zipped which makes them a manageable 600k. -------- trippy1976 - Team KKF2A Assimilating golf balls - one geocache at a time. Link to comment
+ClayJar Posted September 10, 2003 Share Posted September 10, 2003 Questions originally posted by MOCKBA in italics: Can it look for never-found-by-anybody caches? What about the ones not found since a certain date? Hunting virgin / forgotten caches is certainly a big part of this game! Yes, you can use Watcher to do that. In fact, you could say that is the *original* reason for Watcher way back last December. Can it look for caches which have your (or somebody else's) not-found entries? Comment entries? Wouldn't you want to know if someone was successfull after you've run out of luck? You can do things like this. I'm not sure if I cover exactly what you're asking, but Watcher probably comes close. If it *doesn't* do what you want, chances are it's on the Watcher Wish List already, and if not, just ask and it'll get on the list. Can you look for caches within a certain multilateral shape only? I'd love to exclude urban caches from my searches... Watcher doesn't have a polygon filter (yet?), but you can filter by all sorts of things. Distance from a center, for example, lets you choose a cache in the middle of town and filter out all those caches within X miles/km. You can filter based on type (no virts, if you don't want, or no multis if you're in a hurry). You can filter on "container" if you can't stand micros. What are PQ capabilities for searching BMs? Another cacher has a "bmgpx" utility to create Watcher-compatible GPX files for benchmarks. Unfortunately, there's still a bug in Watcher regarding the files bmgpx creates, but that should be fixed by the next release (if all goes well), which will likely be sometime this weekend. (I'm overdue.) Anyway, if you have any more questions, the best place to get answers is probably in the Geocaching Chat. You can find me there many evenings, and most of the regulars are fluent in Pocket Queries, Watcher, and the other various and sundry tools. [[[ ClayJar Networks ]]] Home of Watcher downloads, Official Geocaching Chat, and the Geocache Rating System Link to comment
+parkrrrr Posted September 11, 2003 Share Posted September 11, 2003 quote:Originally posted by ClayJar:+ Can you look for caches within a certain multilateral shape only? I'd love to exclude urban caches from my searches... Watcher doesn't have a polygon filter (yet?), GPSBabel does, though. Link to comment
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