In the past towns and cities were routinely synced on a four to five week cycle. I’ve run in various small towns in Alberta, Canada and after several of the runs I have updated Open Street Maps to correct street names or add missing ones. After a few weeks these corrections would make their way through to City Strides.
However, this routine sync’ing seems to have stopped. None of the towns I have run in have been updated since September and the Town of Carstairs hasn’t been updated since August. Even the city of Calgary hasn’t been updated since the 6th of October.
Has the system changed? Is sync’ing now only available on request? Or has Alberta somehow fallen out of the system?
I am not concerned about seeing my edits instantly appearing in City Strides and waiting a few weeks is not a problem but after something like 14 weeks I do wonder if I’ve missed something or there is a glitch in the system.
Thanks
There are various posts on this in the forum, so it would be a bit difficult to find them all.
Basically, the processing that has to happen after a city sync can take a long time. Larger cities / cities with more people running there - those are the biggest trouble. This can slow down overall global syncing, since a single large city can back up the job queue for hours.
On top of that, I used to sync cities through various Overpass servers (a service that allows querying OpenStreetMap data in various ways). Those servers are quite unreliable, which further slowed things down by causing each city sync to be retried several times before running successfully. That part of the issue is resolved now that I use local data.
After I rebuilt the syncing system, I worked on improving processing speed. I botched that effort a bit, by misunderstanding a certain query … This would result in certain cases where activities would be skipped for processing, which resulted in people’s stats going wrong. So, the actual sync is much faster now but I haven’t resolved the processing slowness.
Supporters do get access to a manual sync option (in the three dot menu on the city page), which seems to help people out a bit.
Appreciate all you’re doing James.
Now that manual sync is back on, I keep getting the error that too many processing jobs are running. Is there a time of day where requests are lighter and I might be able to update some towns?
I appreciate the update on the nuts and bolts James. I’m in the same boat as Alan. Seems to be a round-the-clock processing load on the servers for the past 4-5+ days as I have tried at least a dozen times to manually update a (small, rural, and therefore presumably not very onerous from a processing standpoint) city that was last updated 8-29.
Going back to the OP’s question, is there any update you could provide on the status of automated city syncing cycles, or is that on hold due to the overhaul?
Someone sent Greater London in for a sync, so we’re in for a few days of waiting.
Automated syncing has been enabled for a while now - it was running prior to manual syncs being re-enabled. My response in Routine Sync'ing with OSM - #2 by JamesChevalier still holds - let me know what kind of clarifications you need from there.
I read that and now re-read it and not sure I saw the answer. Maybe my comprehension is bad, I guess what I’m wondering is roughly how long will a non-manually updated city with at least one active strider take to update? At some point in the recent past, cities were updating every 1-2 months.
There are still cities that haven’t been updated since July. Edit: I guess I have some idea
Further complicating this, if someone signs up today & they’ve completed a street in a previously-uninhabited city, then that city gets pushed to the front of the queue. This is because the city was added to CityStrides some time ago e.g. September 2019, so sorting by its last sync puts it ahead of cities that were last synced sometime in July 2025.
At this point, the blocker to a faster automatic city sync flow is the processing that has to be done after creating/updating data. It’s probably the single most stressful thing in my life right now, actually.
Your efforts over the years are totally appreciated! Hope you can figure it out soon and alleviate some of that stress…if it gets to be too much sometimes, go for a run, that’s what works for me
On another note, I think the most obvious temporary solution is to limit manual sync for cities above a certain threshold - i.e., Greater London et al. can only be synced once per month. I’m obviously biased, but it’s just a bit much innit?
I see now that it is a bigger problem than forgetting thick the box marked “Alberta” when re starting the programme. I am happy to go with whatever solution you eventually settle on.
Kevin’s suggestion of a limit on manual sync’ing large cities does sound like an interesting idea. If London, Paris, New York, Berlin etc. can only be synchronized once a month then that should free up resources for smaller towns and cities.
Mind you, I have no idea on how complex that might be to initiate, so it may be a non-starter.
Yeah, I’ve had a 7 day limit on cities with 10k+ streets. I’ve just updated that to 30 days (unreleased; will go out later today) … though I do suspect this kind of aggravates the problem, because there will be more changes to process over 30 days than 7. So I really need to cut down post-sync processing time to get updates running more frequently.
Also asking about this, as there is no apparent way to manually sync a city anymore. My town hasn’t updated since October, and I know I’ve made edits to the map, there also the new streets that have been paved by the city
Yeah I did a run yesterday in the main “City” am targeting right now and noticed two new streets that was able to run and then update OSM with their names. Similarly there was another street which turned out to be gated and could not (easily) get in so marked the bit behind the gate as a private which would lose at least one node. The city Spelthorne, England - CityStrides was last synched 25 Nov 25 so not “too bad” but, not long ago, I could do an OSM update and resync for my next run “tomorrow”.
Thanks for requesting - I’ll run some tests to see what the impact looks like it’ll be … While I have re-enabled the manual city sync feature, I’ve disabled it for cities where street count X user count > 1,000,000 because I don’t yet have a good sense of how things will behave for large cities.
Might you be so kind as to do Harrogate, UK ( Harrogate, England - CityStrides )? We are closing in on 100% so it would be great. When I tried to run the sync, it was blocked as a big city. (I pressed it once and nothing happened, I got this message on the second click, so it might be queued and didn’t show green the first time!)
Hi @JamesChevalier - Would it be possible to run a sync on Jacksonville, FL? Haven’t had a sync since November and I am in the final stretch with only 7% remaining. I have made a number of edits and I keep going back into OSM to update nodes that were edited months ago. Would be grateful.
My profile link : Mike Whiting - CityStrides
It’s probably the single most stressful thing in my life right now, actually.