Result Caching

The HalSail server gets very busy on weekends when there are lots of regattas. There were a couple of occasions last year when it slowed to a crawl, due to hundreds of boats finishing at about the same time and entire crews using their mobiles to see how they had done.

The immediate availability of new results is one of the big advantages of HalSail, so I have been working hard to build more resilience into the system. I have done that by storing results on other computers on the web, as well as the HalSail server. So when people ask for the results of a particular series, the request goes to one of the other computers in the first instance. That computer gets its results from HalSail once every five minutes. This is known as caching.

The net result is that HalSail should be much more resistant to high work loads, but that results may be up to five minutes late. In other words, if a race officer updates the results of a race, those results may not filter through to sailors on their mobiles for up to five minutes. That seems to me to be a reasonable compromise between speed and reliability.

A race officer who is logged in can use the result editing screens to see results. They will not be cached, so what the RO sees is the latest version.

Updated PY Numbers

The RYA released the 2023 Portsmouth Yardstick numbers over the weekend. They are now in HalSail.

If you add a boat to a PY class and it is on the RYA's list, its handicap will default to the new value. But the handicaps of existing boats are not updated automatically. To do that go to the Boats menu, Standard handicaps, click to see your PY classes and then Update all.

Alternatively you can update boats individually, either on the Boat-class crosstab page, or by editing each boat's details.

YTC Handicaps

YTC is a free handicap scheme for cruisers that is increasingly popular for club racing. It is free and the RYA supports it. So I have added it to the list of built-in schemes for any racing class.

Last year you had to use PY handicaps with local name YTC, now YTC is on the drop-down list. Please give it a try.

Design Improvements go Live

As you will have seen if you have visited the site today, the improved design is now live. There is a new home screen for full-size screens (laptops, for example) and a separate one for phones. In addition, there is a simplified home screen for race officers once they are logged on.

Design Improvements

HalSail's website has always been austere in appearance. That is no bad thing. I do not want it to appear like a game, but nevertheless I have decided to give it a bit of a tweak. You can see the result at beta.halsail.com

There are separate designs for the phone home page and the full-size version. After you have logged in the design changes to show you which features you can access, depending on your role. In particular, race officers get a page designed explicitly for them, cutting out all the menus that are only relevant to administrators.

Please give it a try. It connects to the same database as www.halsail.com, so all your data is available. Any changes you make on the beta release will be there in the main release.

I welcome your comments and suggestions.

Increased Server Capacity

The number of clubs using HalSail for large regattas continues to grow, which is great. Of course all those sailors checking their results put more load on our server, which is why things ran a bit slowly yesterday. So I have this morning increased our computing capacity at our website hosting company, which should keep things running smoothly in future.

Slow service on Saturday 23 July

The response time on the HalSail website became very slow on the afternoon of Saturday 23rd July 2022. This was due to very high demand for results from several major regattas running at the time. The problem resolved itself by the evening.

In order to prevent the same thing happening again, I have updated the way results are handled on the server. If somebody requests the results of a particular series they are calculated and then kept in a cache for one minute. If during that minute somebody else requests the same results, they are sent a copy from the cache without recalculating them. That relieves the pressure on the server considerably. If somebody requests those results more than a minute later, after the cache has expired, the results are recalculated.