Hi John,

Nice to see you here. Maybe you could talk a little about the web tracking during Primal Quest?

A number of times I visited the site it seemed unresponsive.

I'd be interested to know:

1) What you might be doing to address bursts of traffic, esp. during events. While I understand events are a special, artificial situation, it seems that a similar type of situation might arise during a normal emergency if the public caught wind of it (think James Kim case).

2) How the emergency aspects of your system are affected (or not) by the overloading of the web presence.

Thanks!

-john

Hi JohnN,

John Dark from SPOT here.

Thanks for asking about Primal Quest. It was an awesome event, and we were very fortunate to be a part of it. Wade Nelson does a nice writeup over at Hardcore Outdoor: http://hardcoreoutdoor.com/2008/07/04/primal-quest-2008-montana.aspx

Regarding the race tracking software, here are the answers to your questions:
Responsiveness -- there are two factors here. The first day, the server hosting the race tracking database was running slowly, causing between 20 and 30 minute delay in updates. The team swapped servers over the first several hours and after that updates came in within 2 minutes from the burst of data from SPOT to the browser.
Separately, there was a ton of data driving these pages, I found that the first load was slow due to file size, but that hitting refresh was very fast. The folks at Primal Quest were definitely satisfied. Not only did they use SPOT for race tracking, but for critical communications with their medical staff and support teams, including two 911 team rescues where the button was pushed, and another dozen teams that they pulled out of dangerously high water by simply tracking their points.

1& 2) Regarding how we handle emergencies: We have multiple redundancies between us and three GEOS locations (primarily Houston), with redundant 9-1-1 monitoring at three of our Gateway management centers, so even if there was no data appearing within the SPOT web service or on Shared pages, the emergency service continues to work normally. Separately, for events, we can use web cloud services such as Amazon, in addition to our own robust servers, to handle the high volume of page views.

John Dark from SPOT here.

For a more current example of how SPOT can be used to publicly track someone, check out how this team is using SPOT in a search for Steve Fossett's location. They use SPOT for public tracking, and as an archive of search locations. You can track them as they search in real time and it's very interesting to see the ground that they're covering. We have posted a note and link to it over at our blog: http://findmespot.wordpress.com/2008/07/17/spot-used-by-teams-searching-for-steve-fossett/

John Dark from SPOT here.

Here's another example of how SPOT is used for tracking and checking in. You can also see how the EAA is using SPOT to track some of the historic planes flying up to Oshkosh for AirVenture 2008: (available until the event in a couple of weeks) http://findmespot.wordpress.com/2008/07/...otor-jw-french/