By Joe Roe, 2024-07-26 20:30:32 UTC
Attentive and/or impatient users might have noticed that XRONOS’ data browser got significantly faster recently. With nearly half a million dates and over 70,000 site records, our backend processes had been struggling not just to display it on the data browser’s map, but to serve large result sets through the JSON API. This meant that API requests for large sets of dates (e.g. the globe, or sometimes just a whole country) would often fail, with knock-on effects on server stability for all users. Happily, thanks to a number of recent behind-the-scenes performance improvements by Martin Hinz, we have overcome these problems. The data browser is snappier and API requests for e.g. all radiocarbon dates from Switzerland are now functional again – and fast!
These performance improvements also allowed us to bring back the ability to download filter sets of dates from the data browser, which we previously had to disable as it was too resource intensive. Users of the XRONOS R package will also find that large queries are now faster and less likely to fail, as this uses the JSON API.