October updates

Listener websockets

A combined effort between Mark and I has moved listener (station) updates to via websockets now! This is a huge improvement in terms of cost and performance. When a chase car updates its position it should be reflected in the web tracker within a couple of seconds.

Request counts

While we can handle a large number of requests we still get charged per request. It doesn't seem malicious and is likely fixed in our latest tracker releases, it seems two users have been making millions of requests a day. We've implemented a WAF to block these requests however that has a cost associated with it and we'd prefer to run without it.

MQTT capacity

It was discovered from user reports that we ran out of MQTT server capacity. During very peak times our servers couldn't keep up and weren't serving traffic to clients. We've added some alarms to alert when this happens again. We've doubled the number of servers that we have to handle requests. It's lovely that we are getting more sondehub users but we'll need more of these users to become Patreon members to keep up with demand. 

Tracker javascript optimisations

During debugging the MQTT issues we thought it might have been related to clients browsers CPU usage. As such we spent a huge amount of time optimising the frontend it. While this didn't resolve the root issue the performance impacts do make the site more accessible on slower devices. There's probably about a 50% improvement in CPU time used for the site now.

Before:

After:

APRS Gateway

APRS gateway stopped receiving APRS-IS messages for the last day or so. It's been known on occasion for APRS-IS servers to just stop sending messages. We've setup some monitoring + auto restart for when this happens.

The gateway had +6 months of no issues prior to this. We treat APRS gateway as best effort, but regardless hopefully these changes make it a little more reliable.  Sorry if you had an APRS flight during this time.

Finally...

I've probably missed many other little things that we've been working on - the project has a lot of moving parts. I'd like to thank our patreons for their support, everyone who logged details issues with us and our dev team.