NOW LIVE! Countdown API moving behind Cloudflare - NEW REVISED DATE: 11.00am Mon 25 Sept (not 21 Aug or 4 Sept)

Open Data
22

Hello, thanks for asking.
This change will now be going ahead in a couple of weeks time, the confirmed date is Monday 4 Sept.
I am about to update the post on this, and emails will be sent out to Open Data registered users (hopefully by the end of this week) again, to confirm the date.

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23

Hi Sarah,

Apologies if this has already been asked and if Iā€™ve overlooked itā€¦

Is there a time frame for when this switchover will happen please e.g. 04:00, 10:00-12:00?

Many thanks,

Simon

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24

Likewise, at what time during the day will this be happening? So that I can create a seamless transition to the new URLā€¦

Thanks.

25

Thank you @SJCooper and @DPlumb for your questions.
The agreed time for this change on 4 Sept is still TBD. Iā€™ll update this post, as soon as something is confirmed.

27

Post has just been updated - change will not be going ahead on Mon 4th Sept. Please see revised date/time in updated post.

28

The original postā€™s body on this thread was edited to change the date to the 4th Sept., it is still showing that edited date.

Simon

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29

Oops - pressed ā€˜Saveā€™ too soon! Should be correct now :grinning:
Thanks @SJCooper

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30

@LeonByford @SarahLS Team, I would like to verify that this change will in fact improve the response times and error rates on the existing countdown system? I have been testing a little bit against the alternative test server and the failure rates and response times are still pretty poor? I have been promising my users for over a month now that this will fix all the problems they are having, but I am not really seeing that it will improve things?

31

Hi. Currently itā€™s difficult for us to pinpoint what exactly is causing these performance issues. By migrating to Cloudflare, we will have more information to be able to address them. It could be that the migration itself could cause some performance improvements, but there may be some further mitigations we will need to do.

TfLā€™s own systems (including the website and TfL Go) get data from the Countdown API, so it is in our interests to ensure the API is performing acceptably.

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32

Thanks as always @LeonByford - this helps a lot so that I can correctly inform my users and not promise something which might not happen instantaneously and take a bit of time to resolve.

33

Quick reminder for all interested parties - the Countdown API change (as described in this post) will be going ahead at 11.00am this Monday 25th September.

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34

@SarahLS & team,

Well, we donā€™t seem to have any issues on our side, so can I presume this has gone ahead as planned?

Simon

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35

I can confirm the config change (to move Countdown API behind Cloudflare) has gone ahead successfully around 11.00am this morning.
Please let us know if you have encountered any issues or have any questions.

Thanks
Sarah

36

Contrary to what I said a short while ago, we started seeing an error around 11:10 and weā€™re trying to work out whatā€™s going onā€¦

(but a curl to the old http address with follow redirects is working from my PC.)

Simon

37

hi @SJCooper - can you please advise which URL you are using and the error you get.

Thanks,
James

38

Hi James,

Thanks for the quick response, we think itā€™s a problem on our side - possibly a missed ā€˜follow redirectsā€™ on one of the curl commands.

Simon

1 Like
39

From my side, no issues experienced in terms of success rate.

40

In terms of Countdown, weā€™ve not seen any issues since the changeover. However, our Unified API import of the Countdown feed has broken somehow. Weā€™re doing a failover of the environment to resolve this and should be complete in the next hour.

41

Iā€™ve just been on a 339 and the on-bus indicator wasnā€™t working. And itā€™s a brand-new busā€¦

Probably just a coincidence.