Slow weather tile loading performance in beta

Hi All,

UPDATE we have a fix - see comment below.

Just a heads up that the weather platform is going through some growing pains right now that are resulting in some very slow loading performance for weather data, if you happen to be the first person to view a new forecast run/layer.

Thanks for your patience while we work through it - I may take a while to get everything sorted out. We’ve increased capacity, but that hasn’t resolved things as yet. We’re working on adding more caching and proactively seeding the map tiles for new forecast runs.

As you might imagine, this all takes quite a bit of computing infrastructure to support - at least by our standards!

Let me know if you have any questions or feedback.

Stephen

Some light on the horizon, so to speak! We made a significant breakthrough on performance on Friday. It needs a little more soak time and refinement, but I’m hopeful we’ll have this deployed to the production weather backend in a few days.

OK - the performance fixes are in place and things are loading MUCH, MUCH faster. My thanks to the team for getting this done and deployed so quickly :pray:

The number of weather forecast tiles that are requested is dependent on your screen size - the larger the screen, the more tiles that are needed to cover the map. On my 14" “retina” MacBook Pro display, with my normal browser window, that equates to 24 tiles per forecast. With layer blending enabled (which is likely what you’ll want to have enabled), that means 48 tiles.

In my most recent test, all 48 loaded in under 2.5s, where I was the “first requester” - i.e. tiles had to be created from scratch.

We’ve also added map tile seeding which proactively goes off to ‘seed’ map tiles into the cache when the new forecast becomes available. That’s currently configured for most layers at only lower zoom levels 0-3. We’ll continue to tune that and will prioritize the more popular layers as we get as sense of usage patterns.

Please do send feedback/questions on the weather functionality - we’d love to hear from you.