About the recent problems
Over the last two weeks, there have been lots of issues with people’s runs not loading when they entered their data. I first suspected a bug, because I had made a few changes behind the scenes, but the explanation is unfortunately a problem with Nike: their servers are incredibly slow. That’s a problem because it’s not something I can easily fix on my end, and it causes timeouts in my code and in the communication with your browser.
One thing I can do, and that is close to being ready, is loading less data initially. This will make the site a lot more responsive and less prone to problems due to Nike, but it also makes a few things a lot more complicated. I hope to have the new code ready within the next week or so.
For now, the solution has been to make some changes on the server as well as the client to make them more patient. Unfortunately, that also means you will have to be more patient, as it will take several minutes for many users to load the data. This is especially true for those of you with lots of runs. If you have more than about 100 runs with GPS data, you might still run into timeouts (the “server is down” message). If you see this, please wait a few more minutes and then try again. In most cases, this should work.
I apologize for the issues and hope that my stopgap solution will tide you over for the next week or so. Things will get more responsive soon. Also, if you’re a RunKeeper user, you will soon be able to directly transfer your data without downloading and uploading again. More on that when that’s ready, which should be before the end of this month.
