BCaching Statistics July’09

I posted a few updates over the past couple months and growth has been steady. The application updates included:

• Handling special characters (like colon ‘:’) in usernames
• Using a mobile profiles database to determine if javascript is supported or not
• Added a Google Maps view (for desktop browsers, not mobile) that shows all your unfound caches in an overlay. Similar to the one on geocaching.com but seems a bit faster. The geocaching.com one also lets you select search criteria and this one does not… yet. I used to use google earth to explore area caches, but now I use this most of the time.
• Alternate mobile style sheet for larger mobile screens (like BB Storm, Android or iPhone) to show text bigger and make it easier to click links if it’s a touch screen.

User activity on the site has been growing.

• 218 users have completed activation with a “My Finds” pocket query. That’s about 50 new users per month over the past 3 months.
• 147 users have uploaded additional pocket queries to make the site usable for them.
• 40 of those users have been active on bcaching in the past 30 days.
• The database has grown to 675 MB.
• 216,260 caches.
• 1,177,336 cache logs.

BCaching users are from all over the world based on the locations of uploaded cache data.

• 56 countries are represented with the majority of cache data from the United States (164,693), followed by Germany (17,344), Canada (11,947), the U.K. (8,454), and Belgium (3,449).

Keep on caching paperless!

500 server errors fixed

All of the sudden today bcaching.com is reporting 404 errors and 500 server errors on certain pages, and the forums aren’t working at all. I don’t know what happened, but I have a support ticket open with the hosting provider to try to figure out what’s going on.

Update: several hours later

The support folks at softsyshosting worked into the wee hours and finally discovered that a server configuration change was the source of the problem:

a handler was incorrectly added to server which caused .php extension to be mapped to ASP.NET ISAPI dll.

So everything is back to normal and that was a pretty quick turnaround.

Emergency BCaching Patch

As a few of you noticed, all of the sudden today your Pocket Query uploads were failing. I thought I had the PQ issues finally resolved with the last release so you can imagine my reaction. What now!??

Turns out that Groundspeak did a major upgrade to .Net 3.5 and the new XML writer used by the PQ generator produces slightly different XML. It is still VALID XML, just a little different.

The BCaching parsing logic did not handle a couple of those differences, and it wasn’t the only system with problems. Older versions of GSAK, CacheMate, among others were also choking on the new version.

Fortunately, the Groundspeak lackeys are on the ball and quickly churned out a change or two that cleared up some of the issues. But BCaching was just not handling some valid XML syntax correctly so I had to make some changes as well.

There is a thread on the Groundspeak forums if you’re interested.

As for those BCaching PQ uploads that failed earlier today, they have now been processed successfully.

Keep on cachin’… er, bcachin’

BCaching Release 0.4.5

Another bugfix release primarily. There are few visible changes, but some significant behind-the-scenes changes. HOPEFULLY no new bugs were introduced, but please be on the lookout.

Full details are on the forum.

BCaching Statistics Apr’09

There has been a lot of growth at BCaching in the last month.

• 190 total signups, 67 of which have completed their activation with a “My Finds” pocket query and 48 which have loaded additional pocket queries.
• 41 users have been active in the past 30 days. That’s almost a 7-times increase from last month! Probably a lot of the growth is related to BlackStar users.
• 77,869 caches (99% increase)
• 376,195 cache logs (63% increase)
• Database size: about 230 MB (77% increase)

Despite the growth, the (new) server response time has been very good. I have yet to see a mobile nearby caches find or filtered find that takes longer than 0.2 seconds and with the migration to the new database server, the timeout errors have disappeared completely.

BCaching Release 0.4.4

Just a small bugfix release.

• Fixed server error when uploading pocket queries containing new countries or new states
• Fixed pocket query updates not removing travel bugs from cache inventories
• Updated waypoint icons with cleaner versions
• Modified password reset email code to allow for 4 hrs after email was sent instead of 1

Host Migration Complete

The website migration to the new hosting provider was completed last week and since then it has been performing beautifully. NO more sql timeout errors and page load times have been consistently snappy.

Unrelated to the site upgrade, I’ve noticed a couple of problems in the application that I will be trying to fix when I have time.

• New BCaching users getting server errors with first “My Finds” upload. This is affecting new users with finds in locations that aren’t currently in the system. When the application tries to add a new state or country it fails. After multiple attempts  it eventually works though.
• Server error on an attempt to reset forgotten password. I’ve only seen one of these errors and I’m not sure what the cause is. If you’re having trouble, post a note on the forums.
• Emailed pocket queries containing uncompressed GPX files are not processed. Although I may add support for uncompressed GPX files in the future, currently the email processor only accepts compressed ZIP files.

New Hosting Provider

I’m happy to report that I’ve selected a new hosting provider for bcaching.com and after some performance and “burn-in” testing the results are good!

The warm-start response times for various pages on the web site are consistently 30-40% better nearly every time and the cold-start response times don’t even compare.

This morning the old site was sluggish and timing out once again so I took the opportunity to take the site offline and migrate the database to the new database server. I brought the old web server back online pointing to the NEW database server and it appears to be running smoothly.

I still have to migrate the forum to the new site, but I should be able to finish that up over the next couple days and then I’ll update the DNS name servers to point to the new web server as well.

BCaching Release 0.4.3

This release wraps up the API changes to support readonly integration with native clients.

If you own a blackberry, you can now use the free BlackStar Navigation program for geocache navigation and get your geocache data over-the-air using your BCaching.com account.  See the BlackStar website for more details.

BCaching Database Timeouts

This morning I noticed BCaching was responding sluggishly (again), and the mobile find nearest page failed every time with a mysql database timeout error. After the outage had lasted over an hour I finally contacted my hosting service, webhost4life.com, to see what the deal was.

I provided documentation from the application logs that showed database timeouts at different times over the past few months. Usually the timeouts occurred in the morning, and continued to occur for 10-30 minutes at most after I noticed the issue. Today was especially troublesome because it lasted over an hour and a half. Normally these pages respond in seconds, or less.

The chat-support person did not have the security required to investigate a database issue so a ticket was opened.

A half hour later there was still no response from tech support but at that time the database started responding within normal limits. I posted a note on the ticket to that effect.

An hour after the ticket was opened I received a response indicating that the site appeared to be working fine and could I check to make sure all was well. Since I knew it was working I referred to my previous message and asked for an explanation and since it was a recurring problem, could I get my database moved to a shared server that was a little less loaded.

Several hours later I finally got an answer: database backups. The slowdowns that occur and result in application timeouts because the database is too busy is from backups. I’m not sure why backups have to run as late as 10:30 am Eastern, but apparently they do. The complete answer is this:

Hi, I have checked the log on the server. Our server was doing backup of the databases. The server is a little slow when it is doing backup. I am sorry it cannot be avoided. We need to backup the database and it is the same on all of our servers. The speed is fine in other time. Thank you for your understanding.

So now I’m looking for a different hosting provider that knows how to manage their mysql database servers better and supports asp.net.