Saturday, May 16, 2009

New simultaneous viewers record and related slowness

Seems like we hit a new high of over 1000 simultaneous map viewers today, mostly thanks to Dayton Hamfest, and a popular live Hamfest video feed with an embedded map. They're giving away freebies.

A couple of components started hitting file descriptor limits, which had last been upgraded over a year ago. Too many simultaneous connections per process. This made the site perform very, very slowly. I quadrupled the limits, and the site started to perform quickly again, I hope that's enough for more than a year to come. Well, I have to admit that it would actually be a nice surprise if the site would be so popular that it wouldn't be enough...

I also fixed a bug in the "first heard" algorithm pointed out by Ian, VK1IAN. The digipeater alias GATE was not treated as a special digipeater alias (like WIDE, RELAY and TRACE are), and an igate which first heard a packet with a GATE in the digi path was not given credit for hearing it first.

Another fix that went in was a filter which takes out complete APRS packets which have somehow made their way to the comment field of another APRS packet. Apparently something is loosing CR LF sequences between packets (could be my code...), which causes packets to go into the comment of the previous one. Before I find the actual bug I've added a filter to strip these off.

Saturday, May 9, 2009

Dayton Hamvention APRS view

Dayton Hamvention is here again on next weekend. I've set up a separate page showing live APRS activity at Hamvention.

Bob Bruninga is expecting to have APRStt running there, too, so if you're visiting Hamvention, you might be able to place yourself on the map using just a DTMF-capable 2m transceiver.

I've also added a new parameter 'he_maptype' in the APRS map embedding interface which allows you to select satellite, physical or hybrid map views in addition to the normal street map.