General needs: Improvements in speed and control

[rgleason]

@mauroc I think generally Squiddio_pi needs to be improved by making it easier to turn on and off POI's and Bouys so that there can be adjustments to the volume of the data so that the speed problem is mitigated.

Also there needs to be some improvements in speed overall. I think the amount of data and size of Opencpn are doing it perhaps.

[mauroc]

Question: is the level of filtering afforded by the Squiddio Preferences dialog box not helpful in reducing clutter? For instance, I tend to turn off AIS markers and buoy reports when I am looking for POIs, and viceversa when looking for weather reports

Regarding performance issues, I can't reproduce the issue with overall speed you experience (for instance, downloading data for the SF Bay area, all POI types visible, takes me less than 250 msec. on a 5 yer old Dell XPS on a 50mbps connection at home). Of course, this depends on connection speed, CPU etc.
To help me identify whether the problem is in the server response / download, or in the local rendering, perhaps you can test a typical request such as

wget https://squidd.io/places/download_xml_layers.xml?region=N02E23
for a smaller dataset

or
wget http://squidd.io/places/download_xml_layers.xml?region=N10E02
for a larger one

My response times average 70-200 ms depending on POI density in the sector, which I think is acceptable.

Finally, if the delays are in the rendering phase, and not the request, perhaps you have a lot of old cached data?
Remember that the best way to clear data you don't need is to
1- hide POIs in a sector (with the cursor on the sector, right click and select Hide Local POIs
2- exit OpenCPN. All cached xml files are deleted for hidden sectors

LMK if this can help put us on the right track

EDIT: you need to check the Delete .gpx files for hidden layers upon exiting.... checkbox in the Downloads tab to enable the deletion of cached data

[rgleason]

fcgle@Hesper MINGW64 ~
$ wget https://squidd.io/places/download_xml_layers.xml?region=N02E23
--2025-04-10 19:45:40-- https://squidd.io/places/download_xml_layers.xml?region=N02E23
Resolving squidd.io (squidd.io)... 138.197.237.80
Connecting to squidd.io (squidd.io)|138.197.237.80|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [application/xml]
Saving to: 'download_xml_layers.xml@region=N02E23'

download_xml_layers [ <=> ] 44.48K --.-KB/s in 0.06s

2025-04-10 19:45:42 (728 KB/s) - 'download_xml_layers.xml@region=N02E23' saved [45545]

=============

fcgle@Hesper MINGW64 ~
$ wget http://squidd.io/places/download_xml_layers.xml?region=N10E02
--2025-04-10 19:46:26-- http://squidd.io/places/download_xml_layers.xml?region=N10E02
Resolving squidd.io (squidd.io)... 138.197.237.80
Connecting to squidd.io (squidd.io)|138.197.237.80|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [application/xml]
Saving to: 'download_xml_layers.xml@region=N10E02'

download_xml_layers [ <=> ] 263.52K 529KB/s in 0.5s

2025-04-10 19:46:30 (529 KB/s) - 'download_xml_layers.xml@region=N10E02' saved [269846]

[rgleason]

Finally, if the delays are in the rendering phase, and not the request, perhaps you have a lot of old cached data?
Remember that the best way to clear data you don't need is to
1- hide POIs in a sector (with the cursor on the sector, right click and select Hide Local POIs - Yes that helps.
2- exit OpenCPN. All cached xml files are deleted for hidden sectors - OK. did not know that.

LMK if this can help put us on the right track

EDIT: you need to check the Delete .gpx files for hidden layers upon exiting.... checkbox in the Downloads tab to enable the deletion of cached data OK

So, how does caching work?

1. There is the OpenCPN chart view. - Is Squiddio using just this data and ignoring any other data that may be downloaded already?
2. There is data cached beyond that view. -Does this data have to be deleted? Can't it be stored somewhere in case it is needed. later?

Yes, it is certain POI or the Bouy and vessel stuff.
Can you improve the vessel weather reporting with David Burch's Starpath source? Or is it a duplicate?

Right click on chart

It should simply say Squiddio Update (not POI)
also Squiddio Hide (not POI)
Squiddio report a POI is probably fine.
I have found Squiddio download satellite images for POIs to be very dangerous, it often fails for me and is a huge time hog.

I've bombed out several times doing this and OpenCPN wants me to revert O to the safe install.

If I have he yellow popup off things are quicker,
but I would like to have access to the View to deselect and select items quickly.

[rgleason]

[rgleason]

Mauro, I put a notice in the forum.

https://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/f134/squiddio-plugin-132122.html#post3987037

[rgleason]

Steve Adler asked this question:
i guess the other addition might be the Voluntary Ship Observations, although I'm not sure which weather service collects and distributes this in a format that is easy to retrieve and parse.

[mauroc]

@rgleason
Rick - the Waypoint dialog box (see your comments re: waste of space, bombing out etc) is a standard OCPN feature and not under squiddio_pi's control. The plugin simply creates Waipoints through the API, then it's up to OCPN to display the dialog box when the user clicks on them.

The only part that the plugin could definitely improve would be the formatting of the contents of the Description field. When I implemented the plugin, I had put in a request to allow HTML content in the description (when I looked into this a few years back it wasn't possible.). That's a change that needs to be done to the OCPN apis/ code code. Once that is in place, I could format the observations as a table and make it look more legible.

[mauroc]

also note that the Links section is often used to provide links to the squidd.io site for more information on marinas, anchorages etc.
The example you show I believe is from a ship weather report, which does't have links on the squidd.io page (the same reason why the Name field is blank: reporting ships do not provide their name/mmsi info)

[rgleason]

True.

[rgleason]

I am not sure there is much we can do about Squiddio.
Maybe you should make that request to improve the waypoint properties in the API?
You would make that request under Opencpn/Issues
https://github.com/OpenCPN/OpenCPN/issues
So that it gets into the next API, (it is too late for the current one api120, so it would be api121 in a year to year and a half.

[rgleason]

Mauro, I am going to have to wait until I have some time to dig into this further and can really focus on Squiddio. Sorry about that.