Efficiency

[readbueno]

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.

There are the Alerts, if these are set up and people checked them, they could be used?
There is also the considerable "waste" of data.
On a suggestion, this evening I tried my station on full Auto, in that three hours, my station sent more signals than in the previous 96 hours and the data rate shot up from less than 15 Mbytes per day to over 1Gbyte per day.
All this extra data for a very marginal return in a few extra strokes recorded?
I have also discovered that UDP does not have a complete communication "handshake," like TCP does and that if data suffers packet loss the station just continues sending data regardless of any acknowledgement, and the server is not even aware that large chunks of data may in fact be missing. With TCP each block of data has to be received correctly before the next set of packets is sent, In UDP this is not the case and there is no redundancy.
While this important fact improves gameplaying by not repeating data requests, thus speeding up the game and filling in from previous data, the lost data just being exactly that LOST!
In a lightning detection and recording system, however, the network could in fact be losing vast amounts of data, due to overload or other reasons and this is not so acceptable?
There is probably, as in most systems, an optimal acceptable rate for data sent and data lost, however by overstressing the system by sending tens or even in some cases hundreds of thousands of extra signals per hour, when this is mainly useless noise, is not an efficient nor effective way to run the network.
Internet Protocols are designed for different types of usage and if we are to have complete archives and mapping then this would also need to be addressed.

Brian.