Last few weeks AirlineFlightSchedules response times seem excessive. When searching a 24 hour period for say DEN to ORD with parameter howMany=150 the search often takes up to a minute, usually around 45 seconds. Then when performing the search again shortly after, it is returned in less than a second. I notice this across all routes that I havent searched in a while, say a couple of hours.
Being a software developer, I would guess they have caching on the backend and at some point the cache expires or is removed because of other queries being cached.
As to why it is slow, many reasons. It is probably running a query on a database of some kind (mysql, sqlserver, postgress). The database has lots of data and may not be indexed well or it might be indexed well just tons of data.
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I agree with and understand all of that. But the lag time didnt occur until recently. Possibly due to all the madness of flight schedules right now. It takes longer to return 2 flights on a route in a 24 hour period now than it did before to return say 30 flights on the same route back in February
Cool. I haven’t noticed much recently but my queries with
AirlineFlightSchedules
are the default limit of 15. I did notice one time that it did take like 20 seconds.
I’m going to have to look into my logs and see if there’s been a slowdown on my end, just out of curiosity.
I’d be curious to know if FlightAware is doing anything with their schedule import/acquisition process as a result of COVID-19 in order to have the most up to date information as airlines continually adjust their schedules; I’ve noticed that the number of results getting returned for scheduled flights is significantly higher than what’s actually operating - I know some of this is the airlines keeping things scheduled and cancelling at the last minute, but I’d also like some sort of assurance that they’re being proactive down their in Houston with respect to all of this.
Can any FlightAware staff weigh in on the reasons for this? And if its expected to remain this way? My searches often time out after 60 seconds while still waiting on a response.
For slowness:
There is a caching process to speed up results. That said, even with without caching responses should still generally be below 5 seconds for N1cameron’s example search. I’m unable to reproduce the the 10+ second times here. If you have any other schedule queries that are outliers please post them.
For the actual schedule updates:
Historically schedules have been updated on a roughly monthly basis. That’s worked well enough in the past, but clearly doesn’t have has much accuracy over time as it used to and we’d like to improve it too. We’re working to have a higher internal update rate, but this is a longer term goal and we don’t have a timeline to share.
May I strongly suggest flagging that as a high priority update? I lost a client because the schedule data has been so unreliable / out of date lately. Obviously the COVID-19 crisis isn’t FlightAware’s fault, but you’ve had two-three months now to improve things, even if on a temporary basis.
Search times seem to be better. Under 5 seconds for most. LAX → DEN for Saturday (today) has been taking around 20 seconds throughout the day.
LAX-DEN is consistently taking over 20 seconds for multiple days, for example.