LightningMaps.org: Real-time Lightning Map

[Tobi]

I hope all these statistics computations and display generation isn't taxing the server. Dale

Don't worry, there's currently no access by users to the computing servers itself.

this thing is more addicting than watching a disk defragmentation program.

And the sound is almost like a Geiger tube, especially when strike rate is around or above ~100/min as currently in Europe and USA

Bug:
The map does not show when I have IPv6 enabled in my browser (Firefox 29.0.1). I only get a empty square where the map is supposed to be. If I disable IPv6 in Firefox (network.dns.disableIPv6=true) everything works. I have a working IPv6 connection and other websites using IPv6 works fine. I also tried in Internet Explorer and Chrome with the same result.

Oops. Fixed now. Had to switch to IPv6-only here to reproduce the behavior. Thanks!

Suggestion:
You should look into replacing polling for new data with pushing new data from the server using the WebSocket API (http://apress.jensimmons.com/v5/pro-html...g/ch7.html). This should save you bandwidth usage and allow you to send each event without delay.

I've already had in mind to use WebSocket, but due to limited time it's currently good old XHTMLRequest only. The server load by the real-time map is currently(!) barely noticeable.

BTW: The CPU load on the clients computers is much higher than on the server due to the animation of those circles and lines. But that's good: Due to the higher power usage, we get more global warming and therefore more thunderstorms and more warming again and so on ....