Latest posts for the topic "Service availability?"

Service availability?

sjs — GMT

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

Re:Service availability?

marc — GMT

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

Re:Service availability?

xipher — GMT

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

Re:Service availability?

Bellinard — GMT

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

Aw:Service availability?

kbechtold — GMT

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

Re:Service availability?

stratosg — GMT

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

Re:Service availability?

marc — GMT

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

Re:Service availability?

stratosg — GMT

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!

Re:Service availability?

mchampion — GMT

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!

Re:Service availability?

hirenraval — GMT

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

Re:Service availability?

marc — GMT

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

Aw:Service availability?

kbechtold — GMT

Hi Marc, thank you very much! The new URL works very reliable and very fast again! Cheers, Klaus

Re:Service availability?

WebDesignHero — GMT

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.

Re:Service availability?

erics1230 — GMT

ws5 is now not working either

Re:Service availability?

klockwise75 — GMT

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,

Re:Service availability?

marc — GMT

I have enabled ws.geonames.org again to try something. But the result is the same and the server was no longer able accept connections, so I have disabled it again. ws5.geonames.org will remain active for at least a couple of weeks, so you have time to switch back, but it will not be a permanent option. Marc

Re:Service availability?

Cimm — GMT

Mark, First of all: thank you for what you are doing! I don't think we say it enough but if the service goes down you notice how many people depends on this great initiative. Thank you for the hard work! Now, is it possible to return a status code like "503 Service Unavailable"? I'm modifying my client program to check for ws.geonames.org and if not found to check ws5.geonames.org. It's an installed application so I can't just switch the URL when everything works again. The result is I need to query ws.geonames.org and wait for the timeout before I can check ws5.geonames.org. A decent status code would make it faster to detect the problem reducing the load for all those queries that are waiting for a timeout. Just an idea...

Re:Service availability?

stratosg — GMT

Cimm, when you are under attack you can't return anything, including 503 :x Marc, thanks for the great service. I just sent a small donation through Paypal. Suggest others do the same.

Re:Service availability?

pboctor — GMT

Marc, the iPhone SDK sends along the application name in the referer. Any chance you can just block iMob? I also use GeoNames in my iPhone app. This will affect a lot of other iPhone apps too. I just blogged about this http://peter.boctor.net/2009/01/22/imob-brings-down-geonames-other-iphone-apps/ Thank You, Peter __________________ Hot Popcorn iPhone Movies App - $1.99! "A well designed interface and easily accessible features that put other similar apps to shame" - TouchMyApps.com http://www.hot-popcorn.com http://www.twitter.com/hotpopcorn http://www.itunes.com/app/hotpopcorn

Re:Service availability?

stratosg — GMT

pboctor, Until Marc responds, let me toss in my 2 cents. When the server is overloaded there is no way you can do ANYTHING. That is, no referer checking, absolutely nothing. It is bogged down and doesn't respond. So, the only solution is to change URL which is what Marc did.

Re:Service availability?

marc — GMT

The first I have tried was to block the requests with the user agent, but this did not make a difference. There were simply too many requests. Don't forget the server is usually very busy answering valid requests and has not enough spare power for hundreds or thousands of additional requests per second, even if most of them should just be rejected. Marc

Re:Service availability?

gloveny — GMT

Would just like to say thanks Marc for doing this. I was in a big dilemma figuring out if my code suddenly had a bug. Then read this forum and saw the problem with the IPhone application and what you have done about it. Thanks very much. IMOB seems an apt name All the best, Graham

Re:Service availability?

pboctor — GMT

So they released iMob 1.0.1 yesterday. Any word on whether this update helps GeoNames? Thanks, Peter

Re:Service availability?

klockwise75 — GMT

Just hope that imob 1.0.1 did not direct request to ws5. This could be a serious problem. No way to block them because they send requests directly from iphone...too many... I'm just writing a bad review to imob on the app store. Marc, one question: I would like to switch on a price based solution with geonames. Now I think this will be a win win solution only if I will have a dedicated dns. Is it possible? Thanks again, dario

Re:Service availability?

marc — GMT

The imob developers have confirmed that the service will be removed from the new version that is waiting for approval by apple. I assume they mean version 1.02, but I have not yet got a confirmation. Dario: yes it is possible to get a separate subdomain for the commercial web services. Best Marc

Re:Service availability?

marc — GMT

The call to geonames has been removed from the iMob application and we have brought back the domain ws.geonames.org. Sorry for all the troubles. Marc

Re:Service availability?

klockwise75 — GMT

Thank you Marc, ws.geonames.org now works. I will contact you about the commercial version. Please remember to keep alive for a couple of weeks ws5. dario

Re:Service availability?

klockwise75 — GMT

Hi Marc,All it seems that ws5 is slow and sometimes down (while ws is ok). Anybody is experiencing the same problem? dario

Re:Service availability?

marc — GMT

I can confirm that both ws5.geonames.org and ws.geonames.org are degrading right now and the traffic by the iMob application is increasing steadily. It seems the kids in the US are getting up now and many of them have not yet upgraded to the newest release without the call to GeoNames. Let's hope they do it soon. Marc

Re:Service availability?

klockwise75 — GMT

So, are we sure that imob is not using now 'ws' in release 1.0 and 'ws5' in release 1.1? Pay attention , in this case we could expect a DoS for both. That is what we can expect because not all guys from v1.0 will update to 1.1... dario

Re:Service availability?

marc — GMT

I only see iMob 1.0 calls in the log files, no 1.1 calls. Marc

Aw:Service availability?

bognerart — GMT

At the moment neither ws nor ws5 works. At least there is no reaction within minutes. http://ws5.geonames.org/findNearbyPostalCodes?lat=27.038773&lng=33.654063&maxRows=1 http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPostalCodes?lat=39.70795&lng=3.46080&maxRows=1 Thanks for your service!