Pocket Queries - Not Running?

Facitman · Post by **Facitman** » 22 August 05 6:31 pm

I understand that groundspeak may have some short term performance issues, this is understandable. BUT as a premium member I signed up for a service that provided ability to automatically receive regular PQs. To change how this functions without advising me is poor form IMHO. Me thinks they have deliberately introduced this "feature" to reduce the total number of PQs running per day. I'm sure there is a percentage of regular PQs which are unused by the recipients and won't be missed, and hence not reactivated. Regular users will notice that things have gone missing and reactivate. Not the most customer friendly method I have seen, but probably effective (I wish I could take this sort of action with my customers sometimes, but we're much too client focused than that!)

Aushiker · Post by **Aushiker** » 22 August 05 7:02 pm

Facitman wrote:I understand that groundspeak may have some short term performance issues, this is understandable. BUT as a premium member I signed up for a service that provided ability to automatically receive regular PQs.

Mmm, just read the Premium Memberships page again, and I don't see any mention of "automatic" PQs .... It does say that "Up to 5 Queries can be generated as often as on a daily basis, and are emailed directly to your in-box." That has not changed.

The page is not dated so it could have been changed, but I suspect not. I would argue you are getting what you paid for ...

They have communicated to you via email about this issue (in each PQ) and it is discussed on THEIR forums ....

Andrew

Aushiker · Post by **Aushiker** » 22 August 05 7:17 pm

The following was posted by Elias on June 14, 2005 in the forum thread "Groundspeak Forums -> General Geocaching Discussions -> Geocaching.com Web Site" which can be found at http://forums.groundspeak.com/GC/index. ... pq+problem.

Interesting that this thread was started on August 13, 2005 ... took sometime for the problem to be really noticed it seems ....

"A number of people are reporting that their PQs aren't generating, especially around the weekend timeframe. I'd like to document what's happening as well as explain the "why" for some of the workarounds that have been offered in these forums.

The truth is, there are more PQs scheduled for Thursday and Friday than can be physically run in 24 hours. PQs also don't roll over to the next day, so for example, queries that didn't run by midnight Friday night, won't be scheduled to run on Saturday - they're essentially abandoned until the next week.

Groundspeak considers this situation a major problem that must be fixed. Unfortunately, its a very difficult problem for which there are no quick and easy solutions. It will take a considerable amount of time to come up with a scalable solution that solves the problem and minimizes the chances of it reoccurring in the future. We certainly don't consider the workarounds given in the forums as solutions; however, they are good suggestions, and they do work if need to get your query on a given day.

The key to the workarounds is understanding how the PQ queue works. This is also documented on the "My Pocket Queries" page, but essentially, the order in which PQs are run is based on the "Last Generated" date, with the oldest queries running first. Its almost a guarantee that a query scheduled for every day of the week won't run on Thursday or Friday, ever. However, a query scheduled for just Thursday, or just Friday should run reliably each week.

Another suggestion is to create new queries when you need them. New queries have never been run before, so their last generated date is essentially infinite, so they jump to the very front of the queue. There's still no guarantee when they'll run, but most people report that they get them in about 15 minutes.

Again, we do not consider these workarounds as solutions. We know you rely on PQs to plan your caching activities, so these tips are offered to help make sure you get your queries when you need them.

Please let me know if you have any questions."

I would suggest that this is a clear statement in respect of the issue. The thread is still active as I understand it.

Regards
Andrew

riblit · Post by **riblit** » 22 August 05 7:37 pm

Facitman wrote:I understand that groundspeak may have some short term performance issues, this is understandable. BUT as a premium member I signed up for a service that provided ability to automatically receive regular PQs. To change how this functions without advising me is poor form IMHO. Me thinks they have deliberately introduced this "feature" to reduce the total number of PQs running per day. I'm sure there is a percentage of regular PQs which are unused by the recipients and won't be missed, and hence not reactivated. Regular users will notice that things have gone missing and reactivate. Not the most customer friendly method I have seen, but probably effective (I wish I could take this sort of action with my customers sometimes, but we're much too client focused than that!)

That is the reason the 'click to reenable was introduced'

Facitman · Post by **Facitman** » 22 August 05 9:25 pm

I do truly understand the issues around managing large transaction applications, I do it professionally, and I now understand that this "feature" is a short term response to peak load. I'm not looking to beat Groundspeak up over this and I'm not going to drop my membership, overall I'm very happy with the service I get, I just would expect a direct communication advising a change in service, they have my email address after all. Posting it in a forum is fairly slack IMHO. My weekly new cache notification on the 12th didn't mention a change to PQ's but it did tell me about the new notify options. They had the option to communicate this change in that email (my PQ for the 12th had the new link) and but they didnÃ‚â€™t. Hmmm didn't seem to get a weekly notify for the 19th? Did I miss a link in that email too?

Aushiker · Post by **Aushiker** » 22 August 05 10:02 pm

Facitman wrote: I'm not looking to beat Groundspeak up over this and I'm not going to drop my membership, overall I'm very happy with the service I get, I just would expect a direct communication advising a change in service, they have my email address after all. Posting it in a forum is fairly slack IMHO.

That I agree with 100%. In fact I would also have liked to have seen the note from Elias posted in the area of the gc.com forums dedicated to their website issues. It would have been more on topic and those who watch this section for site issues would have got the notice.

Andrew

Post by **caughtatwork** » 22 August 05 10:15 pm

I have to agree that the method of communication was not the best. As BB mentioned earlier, who really reads form mails? I also agree with Facitman and Aushiker that it could have been handled a little more forthright rather than just a line in the form mail.

Reading the thread on gc.com it's not a bad method of pruning the dead wood. Turn everything off and then force / request you to tun what you want back on. That way the old queries that run and are no longer collected (possible dead email addresses as one example) are pruned.

Still this only postpones the inevitable. ie. Over time, as the population of premium members increases the headroom created by this excerise will decrease and we'll be back where we are now. Not enough time to run the queries.

I suppose time will tell as to how they solve the problem.

Papa Bear_Left · Post by **Papa Bear_Left** » 23 August 05 12:14 am

Is the framework that gc.com is running on documented anywhere?

If it's running on a dedicated machine, then why can't that machine be upgraded to run faster? (Unless it's already state of the art)

If it's running on some distributed network of machines, then why not simply add more nodes to make it run faster?

Surely scalability is something that's been creeping up on them for quite some time!

riblit · Post by **riblit** » 23 August 05 10:19 am

Bear_Left wrote:Is the framework that gc.com is running on documented anywhere?

Not anywhere outside their office. The public info is that some mob from Redmond supplied the application framework.

langy · Post by **langy** » 25 August 05 8:14 am

Could somebody just reach over and give the PQ computer a quick round of 'percussive maintenance' because I have not had any PQs for a week now!

Anyone else in this boat

setsujoku · Post by **setsujoku** » 25 August 05 9:19 am

langy wrote:Could somebody just reach over and give the PQ computer a quick round of 'percussive maintenance' because I have not had any PQs for a week now!

Anyone else in this boat

Mine are all looking good, as long as i remember to click the link to re-activate them for next week...

Aushiker · Post by **Aushiker** » 25 August 05 11:33 am

setsujoku wrote:Mine are all looking good, as long as i remember to click the link to re-activate them for next week...

Same here.

Andrew

Mind Socket · Post by **Mind Socket** » 25 August 05 5:26 pm

langy wrote:Could somebody just reach over and give the PQ computer a quick round of 'percussive maintenance' because I have not had any PQs for a week now!

Anyone else in this boat

Have you checked your PQ page to ensure that they're still active? They currently get switched off after running, which is a friggin' travesty (which is what all that link talk above is about).

I've received around 4000 caches covering a lot of western Europe this week from numerous one-off PQs.

- R

Zytheran · Post by **Zytheran** » 27 August 05 9:46 pm

Friggin crap, I only have 2 requests at once per week and they were both off. They should have sent a seperate email to tell people, not append it to the end of an existing one. Typical computer nerds, no idea of human factors. The opnly thing I do with that email is strip off the attachment, it's not even previewed or opened. The chance of most people spotting the difference is slim, which I guess is what they want, all the requests left turned off. I don't even have a PDA so the only benefit I get is caches show up on my GPS with abreviated names and not GCXXXX after passing through GSAK. Barely worth it..In actuality my older method was more up to date, every few days do a find on caches in SA (as in by state) and it comes up with the new ones on the first page, cliuk on new ones, save as loc and import into another program for uploading.

This little debarcle has made me review whether it's worth renewing next year..

setsujoku · Post by **setsujoku** » 18 September 05 12:53 pm

I've noticed this morning that the PQ's i received last night dont have this link in the e-mail anymore.

Guess that they must have got the number of queries down to a level that the servers can handle