Tornado Central

Chased in far southwestern KS and far eastern part of the OK panhandle yesterday, but the convection was largely outflow-dominant garbage. Whodathunk?

For everyone using my GRx placefiles: I was contacted late yesterday by my hosting company to tell me that my account had been suspended due to severe server load. Up until this point, the PHP scripts each and every time users updated the placefile (GRx updates automatically based on the "Refresh" line in each dynamic placefile, or every 5-20 minutes for most of my scripts). Earlier this year, when only a handful of people accessed the placefiles, this wasn't a big deal. Now, however, running the scripts (reading, parsing, and outputting the data) hundreds of times per hour on busy days has apparently lead to too-high CPU and RAM useage. As such, I have been working today to redesign the method by which the placefile contents update. I have reworked the scripts and put them in cronjobs, scheduled to run at the same frequency as before. However, this means that the server only runs the actual script once every update period (for example, the OKmesonet script runs once every 10 minutes). For users, you won't (or at least shouldn't) notice any difference, except make sure to note that the placefile filenames for the SPC Day 1 Probability Outlook(s) has changed! Instead of "swody1prob.php?type=****", the new path is "****prob.php" (where *** is tornado, hail, or wind -- all lowercase letters). Please see my GRLevelX Placefile Page for more information.

I'm not sure how to go about doing this for the METARs placefile... I'm going to keep the METARs file the same as before for the time being, given that the update frequency is every 20 minutes when the time is not near the top/bottom of the hour (at which time the placefile is set to update more frequently).