Espots feeds down?

[Aquanuke]

If I hit refresh I can see them anyone else have this.

[getvisible]

nah they're cool on my site

[Supercod]

I have my Website Availability system charting the Espotting feed and it was down today 3 times but not for very long… still I am sure few minutes it was down cost them thousands of pounds… lucky it will have only cost me a couple of quid.

[Aquanuke]

Cheers!

[Robber]

Would you guys mind letting me know what setup you are running for your espotting feeds. We run LAMP setup (2 variations actually) and we find the espotting feed quite often doesn't bring back results - is it just us?

Sometimes we just get an empty result set, other times though it seems there is just no response and our server just sits around waiting, even if we use the php function set_socket_timeout(), this can ultimately cause our server to fall over.

Any suggestions on how we can fix that would be very much appreciated.

Cheers

[Aquanuke]

My server fell over today. I use the php timeout, but it still falls over.

Im sure supercods got it sussed

[Supercod]

Nah ours is the same, from time to time we get no results returned, I know it's not our programming or server set-up but hey what can you do.

We have a dedicated server just for the Espotting site, we using a custom made Perl program that uses LWP and the pages are stored in MySQL. Not get have the server fully fall over on us, but sure it will happen at some point but we are monitoring both the server and the Espotting feed ever 5 mins.

On the whole Espotting has been much, much better this year compared to last year and I am pretty sure they have more improvements on the way. If you think about it, not showing any results during the day for even a couple of minutes has to be costing more money in a month then the equipment needed to put that right.

[Robber]

So its not just me then!

Their guys looked into it for me but we never arrived at a solution. Like Supercod, we got ourselves another server for running espot sites as the server would fall over quite a bit in high traffic times. (One day it was literally every 10 mins from about 11am to just after lunch)

It must cost them a small fortune if it isn't just affecting us - sometimes I was getting somewhere between 1 in 10-20 requests coming back with no results when I know there should be, if that isn't just limited to us then its gotta be costing.

I agree with you Supercod - the amount they are losing from returning no results (probably just off one or two of us guys!) is surely more than it would cost to fix it.

Something I have considered doing is knocking up a perl script that determines how many apache processes are running, when it gets near the max processes limit just restart apache. The trouble is, if you have other stuff going on with your sites (eg online ordering) your users will get a bit annoyed if you suddenly do a restart.

Cheers