WeatherKit stumbles under heavy load. And I don't understand Apple "support."

After Apple essentially shut down Dark Sky early (you can't trust it if it's off-line 8 hours a day 2/3 days), I've transitioned production traffic to WeatherKit.

  1. Generally slower (higher p50's, significantly higher p90s)
  2. Under bursts of traffic, it just chokes. Always. I have many users who have things set up to retrieve the weather on the hour (e.g., 6:00am). I have to have a failover weather source for these peaks, because weather kits just stops returning data under heavy load.

It's not really acceptable that I'm paying significant $$$ for an API, and have to have another source for when the API predictably chokes.

Dark Sky handled the load without breaking a sweat. Ever.

I'm not sure what to do here. It's not an issue with the code, so there's no point in opening a code level support ticket. The feedback assistant refers you to the forums. General performance issues are not addressed by Apple engineers on the forums.

So, the whole thing is a bit Kafkaesque.

  1. Is stumbling under load expected behavior?
  2. Does Apple have any performance expectations for the API?
  3. I've never dealt with an API provider that you couldn't get some sort of acknowledgement about issues. It's just weird.

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sarkonovich
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We are seeing the same issues and the lack of acknowledgment by apple is frustrating. What alternative weather provider are you using?

Posted by
dbraun3
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  • Open Weather has a "one call" replacement for Dark Sky. But 1) still requires a lot of work to get going. It's not a "plug in" replacement. 2) Extremely expensive. Call are 15x more expensive than Dark Sky.

    My Radar is basically a plug in replacement. I think 99% of the fields, field names, JSON structure, etc is exactly the same as Dark Sky. It's also cheaper than Dark Sky. However, it's rate limited at 120 calls/minute. So, you mileage may vary.

    —
    sarkonovich
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