As part of monitoring our realtime GP SOAP clients we are closely monitoring uptime (every 5 minutes). One practice was experiencing poor uptime and we had narrowed it down to a problem were a http connection to the Medical-Objects HL7 Proxy server was hanging and never returning. No errors occured, but the connection had to forcably be closed to allow the client to continue to function.
After narrowing the problem and coming up with the workaround to allow some function (as the http call progressed normally often) we were unable to see any obvious coding issue. Then one day everything started to work and the errors were gone!
An email revealed that the “Cheap” ADSL router had been replaced by a Cisco router. We can only attribute the previous problems to firmware bugs in old ADSL router. This is not the first time we have seen this, but the graphic provides dramatic evidence of the value of a good quality router.
Each horizontal line is one day with total uptime as percent on the left.
