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Vatstats is back

Nick Harasym

By Nick Harasym,
in VATSIM Webmasters

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Nick Harasym

Nick Harasym

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After a long hiatus and re-evaluation of the way we store information on our network, Vatstats is back online and gathering data.

 

As you'll notice, there's a lot of data missing. Back in 2014 when we started gathering data we were doing this as an interesting side-project and never quite anticipated the amount of interest that we received. Our network never caught up with the amount of data we had to serve and we paid dearly for that when our only SSD array had a catastrophic failure and lost the vast majority of our data.

 

We never quite were able to recover from this, and ultimately shelved the entire Vatstats idea until late last year.

 

Everything has been improved - the entire backend has been completely rewritten to be more lean and is now far more clever than it was before. The network is now spread across eight nodes - three webservers, three database servers and two loadbalancers. We're now backing up data every hour to two offsite backup locations - one in the UK and one in the US.

 

We messed up badly last time and want to offer an apology to anyone who regularly used Vatstats as their way of tracking flight data. We have plans to add new and interesting functionality now that that we have a far more stable base from which to work.

 

If you spot a bug or have a suggestion then please use https://bitbucket.org/global7hosting/vatstats-website/issues

 

Thank you.

 

https://vatstats.net/

Edited by Guest
Nick Harasym
Senior Network Infrastructure Engineer 
## [email protected]
## www.vatsim.net
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Colin Schoen

Colin Schoen

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Excellent, thanks for your time and effort to build such a useful tool!

Colin Schoen

VATSIM Senior Network Supervisor

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Steven Perry

Steven Perry

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Mmmm... data.

Steven Perry

VATSIM Supervisor

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Mark Richards

Mark Richards

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Great work Nick, good to have the service back online.

Mark Richards (811451)

Auckland, New Zealand

811451

 

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Anders Moen

Anders Moen

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Very nice! Thanks for getting it back up

 

Found one bug though: https://vatstats.net/controllers/

The link on the controller's name only gives you a 404 error page

Virtual Norwegian | Oceanic Procedures
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Dace Nicmane

Dace Nicmane

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Can anyone tell why neither vatstats nor vataware display the aircraft's ground track correctly?

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Ernesto Alvarez 818262

Ernesto Alvarez 818262

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cause the data is only updated every couple minutes, its not live

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Nick Harasym

Nick Harasym

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Thank you for the kind words all.

 

Very nice! Thanks for getting it back up

 

Found one bug though: https://vatstats.net/controllers/

The link on the controller's name only gives you a 404 error page

Good spot. Should be fixed by now. If you find any further bugs then please log them on https://bitbucket.org/global7hosting/vatstats-website/issues if possible.

 

Can anyone tell why neither vatstats nor vataware display the aircraft's ground track correctly?
cause the data is only updated every couple minutes, its not live

This is correct - VATSIM only updates their own data every 2 minutes so unfortunately this is the best we can do.

Nick Harasym
Senior Network Infrastructure Engineer 
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## www.vatsim.net
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Dace Nicmane

Dace Nicmane

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Is it planned to improve this? I mean, two minutes is a very long time in flying. And surely the controllers get more frequent updates about the aircraft position, so what are those two minutes anyway?

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Don Desfosse

Don Desfosse

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There's nothing to improve. The VATSIM data feed p[Mod - Happy Thoughts]es data every two minutes. VATSTATS already matches that, providing as much data as it gets, as quickly as it gets it. People using flight tracking tools on VATSIM don't require data updates as fast as controllers do. Even RW flight tracking sites don't update as frequently as controller screens.

Don Desfosse
Vice President, Operations

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Dace Nicmane

Dace Nicmane

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I wasn't talking about improving vatstats, so this might be the wrong thread to ask it, but "the VATSIM data feed p[Mod - Happy Thoughts]es data every two minutes" to where exactly? Surely it would be nice if I could see after the flight whether I got that hold or departure right and with today's technology it should be possible.

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Nick Harasym

Nick Harasym

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So the data we use mostly has its origins in https://status.vatsim.net/

 

All of the .txt files under that link are updated every 2 minutes by VATSIM - no more frequently and no less. There is no way to get that data quicker unfortunately. It's not in our hands.

Nick Harasym
Senior Network Infrastructure Engineer 
## [email protected]
## www.vatsim.net
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Ernesto Alvarez 818262

Ernesto Alvarez 818262

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I wasn't talking about improving vatstats, so this might be the wrong thread to ask it, but "the VATSIM data feed p[Mod - Happy Thoughts]es data every two minutes" to where exactly? Surely it would be nice if I could see after the flight whether I got that hold or departure right and with today's technology it should be possible.

 

its absolutely possible, just not via the data feed. there are plenty of free and paid flight tracking software available thatll do just that. those are fed directly from your sim so you can be [Mod - Happy Thoughts]ured its very accurate. that however is not what the VATSIM stats provide, nor designed for.

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Nick Harasym

Nick Harasym

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Indeed. Scrubbing data is something we've considered in the past and may be something we look in to further in the future, but for now we're looking for more medium to long-term data collection. As you say, there's plenty of software out there already that does by-the-second updates.

Nick Harasym
Senior Network Infrastructure Engineer 
## [email protected]
## www.vatsim.net
## ##
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Matthew Cianfarani

Matthew Cianfarani

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Had a chance to play with the site this weekend - Good work Nick! Looks great!

Matthew Cianfarani
Vice President , Technology 
VATSIM Board of Governors

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