Current Situation / Problem
OpenSky started to respond slowly to network requests, sometimes requests completely time out - and timeout currently is 90s. This has several consequences:
Lacking position updates, subsequently bad flight paths when planes try to catch up
Lacking aircraft master data, so that planes that do display, more often than before are displayed with standard model and no flight details
Shutdown of X-Plane / switching off aircraft display can block X-Plane up to 90s (when it so happens that an OpenSky network request is underway that is going to respond late or even times out).
Channels are switched off completely in case of too many errors. This is intended behaviour, but this switching off is also saved in the config, so that upon restart the channel stays off.
Suggested Solution
Better handling of such situations:
[X] Network timeout should be handled differently and per channel:
[X] Network timeout should generally be a lot shorter to be able to respond more swiftly and reduce side-effects to other channels. (LiveTraffic's network architecture has one network thread only, so that a single channel timing out means that all others are also delayed.)
[X] Network timeout should increase with repeating timeout events and be reduced again upon receiving a response. This way we try quickly again, but if there is a continuous problem we don't flood the servers.
[X] Timeouts shall not count towards the error counter, so that timeouts will not lead to disabled channels.
[x] Master data requests should be sorted by plane distance so that the data for the closest aircraft are requested first.
[X] If channels switch off automatically, then this should not be made permament. Technically, the channels can distinguish "enabled" from "valid", but currently when setting a channel "invalid", then it is also set "disabled". And when it is re-enabled via GUI then it becomes "valid", too. There is currently no way to turn a channel "valid" without it being "disabled". That must become a GUI option. This is also tracked as separate issue #215.
Benefits
Less errors from sloppy channels.
Better presentation of the data that is available.
Current Situation / Problem OpenSky started to respond slowly to network requests, sometimes requests completely time out - and timeout currently is 90s. This has several consequences:
Suggested Solution Better handling of such situations:
Benefits Less errors from sloppy channels. Better presentation of the data that is available.
Additional context