GeoNames Forum

Hi everyone!

Being from Germany (and being customer of T-Online) I'm suffering from rather bad service availability (a lot of timeouts) lately. At least since saturday or sunday. I've tested this mostly in the evening hours of CET.

Can anybody confirm this? Is there a (serious?) problem with the GeoNames server(s)? Any forecast for the time needed to fix this?

Kind regards,

Sebastian

Hi Sebastian

The server has been overloaded in the last couple of days. We are trying to improve the situation with blocking access for some very heavy users.

Best

Marc

for the record, I've also experienced a lot of timeouts and bad service availability lately.

it would be nice if one could read about service problems as soon as they appear. perhaps the admins could post something about it on the blog?

also, it would be interesting to know what is considered heavy use, and how the blocking works. how do you know if you are blocked? right now I'm getting "connection reset by peer" errors - is the server overloaded, or is this caused by a block?

/claes

Hi Guys, same problems here in France. Is there any mileage in offering you another mirror server for this part of the world. I'm sure a number of us would help finance it.

I'm not a heavy user but do rely on the output of the webservice for the rest of my page to load so when it goes down basically I have no website.

What do you think?

Best wishes
Chris

Hi Marc,

I'm (GPSies.com) using the webservice of geonames.org about 500-1.000 times over the hole day by the service "findNearbyPostalCodes". I'm a heavy user by definition? Where is the limit? Should I better decide to download the database dumps?

Thank you for your fantastic service!

Best regards from Berlin, Klaus

My service requests are very few as I am still building the site. I get no error message, the service simply times out

A pity because Geonames seemed very reliable until recently.

I wonder if the paid services share the same server? If I had paid for the service I would have been mad by now. But as I have used it freely I can only hope for the best. It used to be a fantastic service and I understand it attracts so many that the server gets overloaded.

The problem since yesterday evening is an enormously popular iphone application called iMob. It is hammering the server with > 100 requests per second which has the effect of a DDOS attack. I am trying to get in touch with the developers to have them remove this feature from their application.

Marc

May I suggest changing the IP + URL (at least temporarily) to get rid of those unwanted hits. I am sure all we programmers gladly edit our code to get access to your services again.

Thank you for your efforts!

Is there a way (blog/webpage/rss feed) that status could be more easily tracked? I've been noticing slow/unresponsiveness to requests and wasn't sure what was wrong.

The Geonames service is awesome and it would make it even better to know when it is having issues. Thanks!

we are having the same issue for last two days.
Is there any solution for this?

I have temporarily removed the ws.geonames.org domain from the dns setting. You can access the server with the domain name ws5.geonames.org

Marc

Hi Marc,

thank you very much! The new URL works very reliable and very fast again!

Cheers,

Klaus

marc wrote:

I have temporarily removed the ws.geonames.org domain from the dns setting. You can access the server with the domain name ws5.geonames.org

Marc

Will the ws5 be permenant? I am writing a script for a guy who is going to be a light user (<100-200 a day), but I want to know if I will have to send him a new version of the code in a few days or if this will always be a permenant one for the people who came and read the forums to find out what was going on.

ws5 is now not working either

Hi Mark,

please, please consider ito keep alive ws5.geonames.org live for a limited time after ws.geonames.org will be up again.
This could help most of us to avoid another DoS. ( more then two weeks could be nice).
We appreciate your effort and commitment.
thanks again,