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[BUG] Server infrastructure isn't up to the task of servicing the regular souvenir promotions.


MartyBartfast

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The website performance today has been absolutely abysmal, and IIRC there were similar issues being reported when the last promotion was on (though it didn't affect me at that time).

It seems clear to me that the infrastructure isn't up to servicing the extra load generated by these promotions, so I wonder whether the marketing people consult the techies before these promotions get out of the "brainstorming" phase?

Some of the promotions in the past probably didn't generate much extra load, such as the ones where we just had to "go find a ???? cache" to get the souvenir, or the ones where friend league points counted towards your totals; but the recent promotions are  "all about the numbers" and are almost certainly  generating a huge load that the servers clearly can't cope with; many people doing multiple searches looking for caches with high FP points, and then logging many more finds than they would normally do.


I realise that Sunday is probably a "perfect storm" of a day, with lots of Europe coming online to log their finds for the weekend, meanwhile the USA/Canada are coming online and doing searches to decide where to go for the day, but even so....
 

So please make sure you do some load/stress tests before inventing any more promotions ?

 

 

Edited by MartyBartfast
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And for those of us who don't give two hoots about promotions, souvenirs or number acquisition it is equally annoying to return from a day out which included finding caches to discover we cannot post the logs in the evening.  I wasted an hour entering 3 logs over & over - either they refuse to submit or they duplicate themselves.  It is not good enough for paying customers!

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On ‎4‎/‎7‎/‎2019 at 11:01 AM, MartyBartfast said:

So please make sure you do some load/stress tests before inventing any more promotions ?

 

...plus, since there's now empirical, real-world evidence that the current level of resources is insufficient, make note of that so resources can be added proactively before the next promotion.

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17 minutes ago, The A-Team said:

 

...plus, since there's now empirical, real-world evidence that the current level of resources is insufficient, make note of that so resources can be added proactively before the next promotion.

I was hoping that Groundspeak learned his lesson when the site crashed for almost an entire day last year in April during an xth promotion...

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10 hours ago, The A-Team said:

 

...plus, since there's now empirical, real-world evidence that the current level of resources is insufficient, make note of that so resources can be added proactively before the next promotion.

That's a leap of faith. It may have been bad timing with a hardware issue. We really don't know if the issue was due to load. Maybe it was, maybe not. It's unfortunate, but I'm not going to speculate on the cause.

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10 minutes ago, Corfman Clan said:

That's a leap of faith. It may have been bad timing with a hardware issue. We really don't know if the issue was due to load. Maybe it was, maybe not. It's unfortunate, but I'm not going to speculate on the cause.

Each time we've had one of the big promotions over the last few years we've seen the same response time issues, and it always gets worse at the weekend; it would be a BIG coincidence if each of them was due to a cause unrelated to the promotions and the extra traffic that they are certain to generate.

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Despite being a dinosaur cacher who most of the time uses GSAK with downloaded PQs to filter, plan, and map for caching, and to compose and upload logs too, I noticed the usual Sunday souvenir slow down . It has happened enough times that I immediately recognised what it was, rather than worrying that something was going on with my computer. It doesn't affect me, which is an advantage of non-connected, non-smartphone caching I must remember for the next time a 'phone vs GPS thread rears its head ....

 

A couple of questions for those who know more about such things than I do :

 

Do the same Groundspeak resources get called on to run the ALC system ? If so, could a perfect storm of souvenir promotion+Sunday/national holiday weekend for a substantial number of cachers+ a sudden burst of popularity in running ALCs cause the hamsters that power the system to die of exhaustion in their little wheels ?

 

Even if the hamsters survive, would those ALC logging folk find their app failed them at the last step in the 'adventure'  ? If it is secure enough (cue light ironic laughter here) to frustrate casual attempts to cheat it, I imagine that would also stop a genuine completer leaving the location before logging it, so they would have to stand around at the final GZ until the Groundspeak hardware recovered from the surge of repeated, frustrated attempts to log  from other completers ...

 

I'd like to think some thought has been put into this,  and the problem has been anticipated by TPTB* and measures taken to deal with it, but the observed effect of  Souvenir Sundays doesn't fill me with confidence.

 

* If not, well, I'm willing to act as a consultant, my fees would be negotiable but substantial :laughing:

 

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