Faulty map rendering - iNat or Google?

[gcwarbler]

Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.

Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About):

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Safari (Mac 14.1.2) and Chrome 103.0.5060.114 (Official Build) (x86_64)

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: Example: See screen captures of iNat observation 20809735 from Safari and Chrome.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/20809735

Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/):

Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.): I suspect this is a Google Map/Earth problem but I thought I’d point it out anyway. At certain zoom levels, the map of observations shows either long smears of pins (on Safari) or as a missing part of the set of observation pins (Chrome). Sometimes zooming in/out a few times seems to resolve the image, but on Safari, I can still find one magnification which suddently smears the pins (as above).

Step 1: Load an observation with many pins within the current map area.

Step 2: Screen image has streaked (or missing) observation pins.

Step 3:

[fffffffff]

I always perceived missing parts as heavy load on iNat when those spots are opened, not linked with maps per se, but a website issue.

[gcwarbler]

That may be he case, Marina. Today (7/6), the map of pins for that particular observation seems to render properly. Curious.

[hkmoths]

agree with that sentiment, Marina. I often find that when my wifi is confounded by my ISP, i.e. low speeds, the rendering takes a while, with areas of a map devoid of observation location pins, as per the Rachria Fire Rd screen grab depiction. This may also be a server usage problem, i.e. when lots of people use iNat at the same time - I have noticed this can happen during the City Nature Challenge events of late April when iNat gets swamped.

[pisum]

@gcwarbler

Today (7/6), the map of pins for that particular observation seems to render properly. Curious.

if it’s gremlins that can’t be reproduced, and the original problem is gone now, it may be time to close the bug report.

just for reference, the specific tile that is showing up strangely in the original screenshots is:

• https://tiles.inaturalist.org/v1/points/10/87/200.png?verifiable=true&style=geotilegrid&tile_size=512&color=%23FF4500&taxon_id=47124, or
• https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/points/10/87/200.png?verifiable=true&style=geotilegrid&tile_size=512&color=%23FF4500&taxon_id=47124

[pisum]

i encountered this today in another observation:

the specific tile is:

• https://tiles.inaturalist.org/v1/points/10/120/211.png?verifiable=true&style=geotilegrid&tile_size=512&color=%23FF4500&taxon_id=47201, or
• https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/points/10/120/211.png?verifiable=true&style=geotilegrid&tile_size=512&color=%23FF4500&taxon_id=47201

when i opened up the tile directly, it initially appeared as only about 2/3rds full of pins (as it existed in the observation page map), but after refreshing it a couple of times, it eventually returned all the pins. after that, going back to the observation and refreshing that did not trigger a change in the map. (it still had missing pins.) i assume this is related to browser caching, though, since opening up the same observation a private browsing window did end up showing me all the pins.

seems like this kind of thing is probably related to just the massive amount of data in iNat now and the capacity of the servers to process it all. but that’s just a guess. not sure if that would be a bug exactly.