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Geocaching.com site Extremely slow

Fiver1

By Fiver1
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thebruce0

+thebruce0

Posted
Posted
5 hours ago, MartyBartfast said:

There are people getting killed pretty much every hour somewhere in the world, so by your reasoning nobody should be complaining about anything ever.

That's not how the world works.

 

Really puts into perspective the luxuries we have and can even pay for in parts of the world where that doesn't happen, doesn't it?


Everyone has responsibilities and expectations; but let's try to stay reasonable.  Think of the big picture.  This is a hobby. A slow website is far from the end of the world especially given the relative crumbs it costs for a full year membership. Why must things be done immediately? Right freaking this instant or I'm never giving you another penny? That's a bit overboard. If you feel unsatisfied, you have every right to withdraw your membership. But yeeshk, the vitriol we see sometimes in the forum when there's a problem being actively dealt with is eyebrow raising.  Take a deep breath...

 

Thank you HQ for doing what you're doing to resolve the issue.  Please do your best. We know you want your products and services to be in good shape for us, your customers, and that every hour there are problems costs YOU money and customers. So keep working at it dilligently!

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PnavE_81

+PnavE_81

Posted
Posted

Of course it is only a hobby and there are much worse things in the world. However when you pay money to a company that deliver the tools to be able to spent time on your hobby, you expect those tools to be available at the times you (and 95% of all other people with the same hobby) have the time to do this: during the (extended) weekend. We are the hobbyist, but the people at HQ aren't. They make money of us hobbyist. I'm even glad they do! I really hope they keep financially healthy so we can continue with our hobby. But in return we should be able to expect a stable environment.

Of course you can have your offline database ready in advance so you are not affected as much, but as you have said, it is a hobby, and not everyone has such a "professional" offline geocaching setup as a lot of us forumusers probably have. As a hobbyist you shouldn't have to check in advance to see it could be a busy weekend (because of some souvenir thing or holiday somewhere in the world), to have a complete database ready. The official app is even focused on "on the fly" geocaching (although offline support has been added later on). Of course every system can have some issues sometimes, but if they are as predictable as they have been for the last few weekends (based on experiences during similar weekends in previous years), then HQ should have seen this coming as well. Every busy weekend has these same issues for a while now. I know it is difficult to troubleshoot an issues when it is not occurring at that time, but they are dealing with this very reactive instead of proactive (well at least it appears that way to me..I have no information on what's really going on in Seattle). And of course the issues get fixed every time, but are they really? Isn't some part of the fix the fact that rushhour on the website has just passed?

 

On a side note...I'm glad they put out the latest announcement, but the contents doesn't take away my worries for coming busy periods. The underlying problem isn't solved yet (or even identified). I do hope however we get more announcements like this with updates when issues occur. Even when there is no real solution yet, I like to be informed about what's going on.

 

Ok I spent way too much time writing this post. Hope I got my point across, althougt I'm not even sure I even have a real point to make :blink:

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thebruce0

+thebruce0

Posted
Posted

Sure, as I said, there are responsibilities and expectations, and we have every right to hold them to that. I'm not saying we shouldn't reasonably criticial. But if one gets so ranging angry map maybe one should take a step back, take a deep breath and stop assuming the worst about the situation (we have no idea what technical difficulties are being thrown at them), or the people and motives (you think they are fine with having a non-working website, the core of their business?)

 

"Whack-a-mole" is a common analogy for being unable to trace the problem, and dealing with effects and issues as they pop up while trying to zero in on the main issue(s).  That necessarily means the problem couldn't be forseen.

 

2 hours ago, PnavE_81 said:

Of course every system can have some issues sometimes, but if they are as predictable as they have been for the last few weekends (based on experiences during similar weekends in previous years), then HQ should have seen this coming as well.

 

Should they? I highly doubt no one thought "it'll be a busy weekend, let's be ready". But I guarantee no one thought "let's be confident that nothing bad will happen that we can't predict could happen".  Clearly the issues in play are not the same as past issues. As they said it "does not appear to be caused by server or hardware problems", so upgrading the servers apparently would not have avoided the issue.  So they have to track down where the problem is, and that sounds like code. If it's the exact same problem as last year, then there might be an argument to make about HQ not actually solving problems and improving the system. But with 99% confidence I can rest assured that's not the case.

 

Now, could their development system be better? Sure, every company with a service like this could always improve. But geez, give these guys a break - the backbone of their entire business is playing cat and mouse with them and they are doing what they to figure out what's wrong. You can't predict the unpredictable. That's the point, and that's the problem.

 

What we pay for is not guaranteed 100% uptime. So no I can't say they are breaking their commitment they made when I gave them money if their entire system has difficulty on my long vacation weekend when I choose to go geocaching because I have the luxury and free time to do so.  But it's a capitalist society, I can withdraw my once-a-year cost-of-a-meal-or-two funding at my will.  They know that.  That's why they're doing (reportedly) their best to get everything back to working shape.  Let's help them do that - report problems - rather than yell and complain and accuse (Does that help them? Does it help us?)

Stressing out the way some appear to be over something like this is unhealthy.

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Team DEMP

+Team DEMP

Posted
Posted

Maybe it's time for allocation of resources to performance testing the site. Supporting websites isn't as easy as those that don't do it often assume, but for those of that do support high volume customer facing sites, performance testing is a critical component to both identify bottlenecks and troubleshoot real-life work loads. One would have to guess this isn't something being done or the real-life load being used needs to be tweaked. 

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Team DEMP

+Team DEMP

Posted
Posted
31 minutes ago, thebruce0 said:

I'd agree, though their claim that it's not server or hardware related makes it sound like it's not a matter of load...

 

Eh? Are you responding to the load testing post or something else? Where is a statement that it isn't server or hardware related? And if there's sub optimal "code", load testing will surface that. 

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Team DEMP

+Team DEMP

Posted
Posted (edited)

I believe that answer to be vague and possibly misleading (though not necessarily on purpose). It could simply mean that there wasn't a server or infrastructure failure. In addition, adding capacity to say a database server doesn't necessarily address even a sub-optimal database request. I've had a DB server with 4 CPUs max out and spinning up a 16 CPU DB server made no difference. Not everything is addressed by throwing more hardware at it and often it just gets you slightly past the choke point until you can address the root cause. Adding more CPU wouldn't help if something was io constrained. Etc.

Load testing isn't done just to determine server capacity it is done to identify end-to-end bottlenecks/throughput. 

 

 

Edited by Team DEMP
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thebruce0

+thebruce0

Posted
Posted

Oh I wouldn't be against load testing in the slightest. Absolutely in a service and website like this with many online facets and vectors of interaction, especially with the introduction of a souvenir promotion with this amount of increased activity (not merely find logs on caches by one user, but also favourite point triggering towards a secondary user account).

 

But the way I took that comment was that the load didn't grow beyond server capacity naturally (merely by increased use, and my inference is that the problem wasn't caused by the souvenir promo). Rather something else affected the system to the point that things are chugging. An east coast blackout sort of chain reaction perhaps. A patchwork solution was to increase server capacity - but the capacity itself isn't the problem. The problem (or multiple?) is still being determined, whacking'em as they pop up as needed.

 

That's my understanding.

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fallingforstars

+fallingforstars

Posted
Posted

This is an old thread but here we are in January 2022 and the site is still extremely poor in its response times - usually in regard to displaying map requests, so maybe a problem of how it interacts with Google maps. Makes no difference which browser you're using. Two different occurrences shown below - first when requesting the map and second selecting the type of map ie.satellite.

 

{ "message": "Loading chunk 41 failed.\n(error: https://www.geocaching.com/play/map/public/41.80831800cf56ef48f631.js)", "name": "ChunkLoadError", "type": "error", "request": "https://www.geocaching.com/play/map/public/41.80831800cf56ef48f631.js" }

 

{ "code": "CSS_CHUNK_LOAD_FAILED", "type": "error", "request": "https://www.geocaching.com/play/map/public/53.css" }

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lee737

+lee737

Posted
Posted

I honestly can't say I've found the site slow at all for ages, and I can't recall issues that weren't directly related to the quality of whatever junk wifi I had access to in regional Australia..... are you sure it isn't related to your own connection?

There have been outages, but to be honest they don't seem more frequent than any others, and seem to be rectified promptly....

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Bl4ckH4wkGER

+Bl4ckH4wkGER

Posted
Posted
On 1/24/2022 at 12:43 AM, fallingforstars said:

This is an old thread but here we are in January 2022 and the site is still extremely poor in its response times - usually in regard to displaying map requests, so maybe a problem of how it interacts with Google maps. Makes no difference which browser you're using. Two different occurrences shown below - first when requesting the map and second selecting the type of map ie.satellite.

 

{ "message": "Loading chunk 41 failed.\n(error: https://www.geocaching.com/play/map/public/41.80831800cf56ef48f631.js)", "name": "ChunkLoadError", "type": "error", "request": "https://www.geocaching.com/play/map/public/41.80831800cf56ef48f631.js" }

 

{ "code": "CSS_CHUNK_LOAD_FAILED", "type": "error", "request": "https://www.geocaching.com/play/map/public/53.css" }

 

This is not related to the topic of this thread. There are several threads in the forums that more specifically address the issue you are seeing. Please use the forum search.

I am closing this thread.

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