BirdsEye regularly crashes BaseCamp 3.0.1

Former Member over 15 years ago

I have been using BaseCamp 3.0.1 for a little over a week now to download BirdsEye imagery. During that time, I've pretty much been attempting to have a download in progress whenever possible, leaving my Orgeon 400t tethered to my desktop and monitoring it remotely when at work. But during that time I've only managed to download about 20 map sections (with 20k tiles each at the highest resolution imagery)

It almost seems that the app has become more unstable the more map sections it has added to "My Collection". At first I could download several entire map sections without a crash (albiet taking 8 or more hours per map section!) But now I can maybe download a few percent of a map section before another crash hits.

My desktop is a 2x2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon with 10GB memory running 10.6.3, so BaseCamp itself is pretty responsive and isn't taxing the system when running. Network connection is through the cable company, so downloading the 20,000 map tiles at about 4KB each shouldn't take more than a few minutes.

Is this experience typical? If so, does anyone know of a workaround to reduce or eliminate the constant application crashing and/or speed up the downloads themselves?

Thanks for any info!

0 SwissMountainLeader over 15 years ago

My desktop is a 2x2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon with 10GB memory running 10.6.3, so BaseCamp itself is pretty responsive and isn't taxing the system when running. Network connection is through the cable company, so downloading the 20,000 map tiles at about 4KB each shouldn't take more than a few minutes.

Is this experience typical? If so, does anyone know of a workaround to reduce or eliminate the constant application crashing and/or speed up the downloads themselves?

Thanks for any info!

my macbook pro is nothing like that powerful and the performance is fine, looking at the posts here it seems the mac version is way, way quicker than the PC version (caveat, in fact my PC version in a vmware machine is fine as well).

But, I don't get crashes like you're seeing. As for the download speed, I can't imagine that's anything more than server capacity, they need to address that in-house or go out to someone like Akamai and sort it out. It's way below anything that's reasonable but I'm sure Garmin are aware of that.

0 Former Member over 15 years ago

DFLYE:
Why are you monitoring BaseCamp remotely? If BaseCamp downloads so slowly, why would you need to worry about all of your queued downloads finishing while you're out?

App performance with BirdsEye:
The current release of BaseCamp can't handle that much imagery at once. In my experience, it seems that once a user hits about half a million tiles total the app's performance begins to degrade. The 20ish max-sized BirdsEye Imagery items you have are easily around that number. For best performance, I wouldn't recommend more than half that. Having hundreds of thousands of tile downloads queued exacerbates the problem, which it also sounds like you're doing.

We plan to address those performance issues in a future release, but I'd also like to say that having much more than 1GB of BirdsEye data on your device at a time generally won't result in the fastest performance in the field, either.

I know a lot of users are trying to fill up their SD cards with 2-4GB of data, but it's best not to.

Download speed:
Tiles are usually larger than 4KB, but yes, the downloads are slower now than when we initially released. That's something we also plan to address, and likely will not require an update to fix.

0 Former Member over 15 years ago

DFLYE:
Why are you monitoring BaseCamp remotely? If BaseCamp downloads so slowly, why would you need to worry about all of your queued downloads finishing while you're out?

I have to monitor it due to it crashing so frequently. Originally I could queue up multiple downloads and it would chug away happily. It has degraded over time to where it can't even complete one download without crashing, so I haven't bothered to put more in the queue until I can coerce a single download to complete.

App performance with BirdsEye:
The current release of BaseCamp can't handle that much imagery at once. In my experience, it seems that once a user hits about half a million tiles total the app's performance begins to degrade. The 20ish max-sized BirdsEye Imagery items you have are easily around that number. For best performance, I wouldn't recommend more than half that. Having hundreds of thousands of tile downloads queued exacerbates the problem, which it also sounds like you're doing.

Okay, that explains why it rapidly degraded so severely recently. Time to copy what I've got to SD and set aside the current BirdsEye caching for potential recovery later. If BaseCamp is maintaining an open file handle for each of those hundreds of thousands of tiny files, I could see the OS eventually crying foul.

We plan to address those performance issues in a future release, but I'd also like to say that having much more than 1GB of BirdsEye data on your device at a time generally won't result in the fastest performance in the field, either.

I know a lot of users are trying to fill up their SD cards with 2-4GB of data, but it's best not to.

Not planning to have more than a GB or 2 of data on any given SD card, but I am planning to have one SD card for "home", several setup for common vacation destinations, and one for ad-hoc trips.

Download speed:
Tiles are usually larger than 4KB, but yes, the downloads are slower now than when we initially released. That's something we also plan to address, and likely will not require an update to fix.

Thanks for the speedy response with all sorts of good info. :)