JimKing has been in conversation with Tony and it would seem that the server has issues because it is simply doing too much. It supports the gallery function, the forum and acts as a host for all weather requests.
It makes little sense from a design point of view for these functions to be served from the same machine as they will only conflict with each other the more popular they become.
I believe that is why we are seeing the temporary forum outages and failure of the weather feed to update. According to Tony so many users are using the weather function that the server is having to work incredibly hard just to serve the weather calls from tens of thousands of widgets from desktops.
The reason for the server handling all the calls to the weather feed is probably one of cost given that all lookups to weather services such as accuweather cost money, real hard cash. If the Xwidget server polls the feed and then all xwidgets take their feed from the Xwidget server, then the diversion provides a good service to xwidget users for free and saves them a lot of money!
I've asked Jim to tell Tony to look at aviation.gov, an entirely free feed that has the weather feeds that he needs with no limit. Then the Xwidget users would poll the feed themselves and we would not need our own xwidget weather server.
I used it in my weather yahoo widget here, pure javascript that calls the aviation.gov weather feed directly:
http://lightquick.co.uk/downloads/steampunk-weather-widget-mkii.html?Itemid=264
If, however Tony follows my recommendation and converts the feed extraction to aviation.gov and keeps the server polling frequency low, perhaps once every 30 mins, the load on aviation.gov should not be too high so they won't be tempted to turn off the free feed.
It also makes sense to separate the three functions, forum, gallery and weather server.
The online gallery function merely needs to point the browser to a location, it does not matter where that source is served. Separating the gallery might make sense in itself.
The forum would be a good item to move as it is mostly just text. If it were separated to servers that specifically host forums then there would be benefits in performance, tools &c.
An alternative is that he keeps the accuweather feed as it is now but runs a server specifically dedicated to this task.
Please be aware that Xwidgets currently has a built-in vulnerability that if the weather server redirect dies then a big an important part of xwidget dies with it forever and Xwidget becomes partly unusable. It is design issues like this that would become apparent if the engine was open source and we knew what was going on inside! This is bad design to get round a problem, a workaround that has become part of Xwidget but is now a vulnerability to the long term usage of the Xwidget engine.
P.S. There is a good side to this. It highlights a design issue that Tony is fixing (I believe he is) and it shows that Xwidgets, at least the weather function is still being used by a lot of people!
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