GeoNames Forum

I've recently noticed over last couple of days the following reply when using the search webservice:

<geonames>
<status message='the free servers are currently overloaded with requests.' value='22'/>
</geonames>

This was from entering in a query like below.
http://ws.geonames.org/search?q=london&maxRows=10

Has this been a long running problem? Also, is there any chance the situation will improve in the future?

Thanks.

There are three main reasons for this:

- more requests after the holidays
- more requests from mobile users that have got new smart phones over Christmas
- additional features that need more server resources (the number of wikipedia articles for instance has multiplied this week).

Here the options to improve the situation:

- raise more money http://geonames.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/sponsoring-geonames/
- cut features to spare server resources
- reduce the number of requests in particular for smart phone users. This would require to enforce an user identification with each request and count the credits per user and not per ip address.

What do you prefer?

Marc

Thanks Marc,

Firstly, I am very appreciative of your service (and have in the past donated).

I have only just noticed your Credits scheme which looks enticing and I may well sign up to this. It will be interesting to see usage graphs too

In order to improve your free service, I think it would make sense to move to per user rather than IP address given the rise in mobile use. Also, I don't know if it's worth adding more control over what fields are returned in, for example, the search command. I have to request FULL (because I think I need admin1Code to get US state) but a lot of the extra data is ignored.

I found a bug in the apache connection pool (documentation does not match implementation) used by the new wikipedia implementation.
Changing the config will certainly improve the situation. (the db statement timeout was ignored)

Marc

I've just signed up for one of your Credits scheme and all seems to work fine so far.