My Store Locator Plus® was updated this weekend with new software. While we were at it the MySLP servers were upgraded.

Better address accuracy outside the United States

The biggest change to the My Store Locator Plus® software was the implementation of region data handling. The map domain, aka “region” setting under Store Locator Plus | Settings | Map influences the accuracy of the results returned for new location addresses as well as user searches.

Users in countries like Australia or parts of Western Europe should see a notable improvement in the accuracy of locations returned when searching for an address. The map engines, primarily Google, that are used to geocode addresses are more heavily influenced by the region setting in those countries.

Better location loading performance

For those MySLP customers that are migrating from a self-managed WordPress plugin-based site, the Load Locations feature is a great way to pull in basic location data directly from your live site. The location loading service has been retooled to automatically keep pace with the performance of your web server.

The previous release of the location loader would fetch the list of locations. If your site had 800 locations it would then blast your server with a rapid succession of 800 requests for location details. Many web servers could not keep up with the requests and would throw back a “hey, quit bothering me” response after the first 100-or-so location requests.

The latest update to the loader will now wait for your WordPress site to respond with a “here are the location details” before moving on the next request.

Server Hardware Updates

To better handle large data processing request from our Enterprise class customers we’ve upgraded the web server and database server cluster for the My Store Locator Plus® service.

The web server has been updated with nearly 4x the memory and more than double the processor cores. Combined with better tuning of our web app services and server configuration the web server can now handle 30x as many simultaneous web requests as it could last week. No, that is not a typo.

The database server has also been updated. It has been upgraded to a high performance network I/O channel, had a memory upgrade to 8x the former configuration, and double the CPU cores. The combined changes to the hardware and server configuration yields a full order of magnitude increase in parallel processing requests — actually slightly more at just over 11x as many requests. Speed of requests has also increased by 12 – 47% depending on the nature of the data query.

Better performance, no cost to you

Bottom line – MySLP customers will see better performance, especially when processing large location updates. Rendering of maps showing more than 100 locations at a time will also see an increase in performance. No extra fees or plan changes required — sit back and enjoy the fruits of our labor.

Who said there is no such thing as free lunch?

Jealous? Get in on the goodness.