Ham Radio Forum

Yesterday was the first heavy-use day the website has had, with 575 unique users in 24 hours. Remote user S-Meter plots access the server twice per second per user. In addition, the server accesses the Kenwood receiver four times per second for signal strength updates. That is a lot of activity compared to serving a typical static website. In fact, enough to expose a programming mistake that wasn't caught in testing (first mistake I ever made!!!).

Like many coding mistakes, it was very simple. One missing character was causing error messages to be written to the server Application Log four times per second even though no errors were occurring other than the false error logging. The server has a maximum Application Log file size. Windows generated its own error messages four times per second after that limit was reached, which exacerbated the problem. The end result was that the server became terribly busy trying to keep up with all that, causing user S-Meter plots to slow-down and possibly even hang. We had no reports of that, but it probably happened.

The program (actually a program written to run as a Windows Service) was fixed tonight with a single keystroke, a recompile, and reinstallation. Hopefully, plotting performance will be better tomorrow. However, a considerable amount of newly written program code is being used, so the risk of another problem or two is high.