Efficiency

[allsorts]

Hi Dave, I think that does not sound too bad. The actual cap/weighting and the number of signals used data, should be calculated using data that is available from the server over various periods of time, and IMO the longer periods do not need to be "real-time," i.e. they could be calculated and stored only once over that time period.

Well what ever is adopted will be handled by the server as the current system is. I agree though that for evaluation the data ought to come from a carefully crafted URL request to the server. I did check that, for my station, the "Participated" count in the station list agreed with what MyBlitzortung said, which they more or less did.

I think the longer periods should still be a rolling period, ie the last 24 hours, updated every 5 minutes. If you had 24 hours updated every 24 hours the first data could be nearly 48 hours old: Update at T0, first data is T-24 hours old. Just before the next update at, T+24, the first data is 24+24 = 48 hours old.

I still think that geographical clusters might serve some useful purpose, but maybe they aren't so important.

Geography probably has a place to check how your station is doing in a general way. If you assume that sferics are going to be fairly similar within, say, 50 km of the station. Large differences in Signals and Participated would indicate a problem of some sort. Relatively high level of local noise, forcing the threshold up, a poorly setup station, causes being on either yours or the other station(s).

Maybe these stations should be excluded from the server during busy periods automatically.

(Stations sending 10's of thousands of signals/hour but only participating for very few of those signals).

Excluding the data from these stations doesn't help with them "clogging up" the link(s) into the server. Unless they are told to shut up the packets will still be sent and the server do something with them even if it's just drop them based on IP address. If we can come up with a good "performance measure" that could be used via the regular "phone home" system to tell a station to shut up. The hard part is how do you inform the station operator that their station has been told to shut up? email I guess, if a valid email is known. A "message waiting" flag in the controller web interface might not be seen for weeks.