Hmm, I wonder if you're hitting the free limit for geocode requests in a single day:


https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/business/articles/u...

I didn't see any hard figures on there but last time I was digging around I think the limit was around 2500 per day. If you're on a big shared host, many sites may share the same outgoing connection IP to request geocoding from google so it might not be your site alone that is doing this.

Take a look at your logs and filter by type dealer_locator. See if there are any messages like "Over Query Limit Error received from google for address..."

Thanks for the reply. I checked the logs and didn't see anything like that in there (although because I checked it today and not yesterday I couldn't see the log results for the full day on Wednesday). I also looked at the page views for the month of February and the site is averaging 122 visits per day. Google says that their free limit is 2500 map views a day for 90 consecutive days. And they said that if you hit or approach that threshold, they'll attempt to contact you about upgrading to the paid version. I don't believe the site owner has been contacted by Google and the fact that the page visits are well below 2500 a day makes me think it's not hitting the Google limit. Also, if it did hit the limit, would Google really just restore access to the map service the next day?

Side note, the analytics that I reviewed said it averaged 122 visits a day in February but also said it averaged 5597 hits per day. I tried to google around to understand the difference between a hit and a view and I think I'm safe in assuming that the views are what really matter in this case.

If it's not hitting the limit, what else could be going on?

Hello,
If you are getting a large volume of visitors, you might be running out of what google feels is acceptable for basic maps usage. If you are getting a large volume of searches for locations, you may be exceeding what Google thinks is acceptable for searches.

Here is some more info:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20087969/google-javascript-api-g...

Basically the actual block is using "client side geocoding" and "map display". The job that does the actual geocoding of your locations is using the "php api" as referenced there. But you only "spend" your php API calls when you run the geocode job from the dashboard.

It sounds like you are exhausting your map views.

Thanks. I just checked the Jobs page in the dashboard and it says that the last time the "Geocode Dealer Locator Addresses" ran was 6/17/2013 at 11:28:35 AM. Based on what you're describing, doesn't that mean it's likely not a limit issue since it hasn't run that job in over 8 months?

Hello,
If you look back at that S.O. thread, it does show that there are situations where google can block "Live" API usage. If you can let us know when this is happening on your live site, we might be able to determine what the issue is. You would probably be seeing notifications in your log too if it was over the geocoding API limit for the job. Generally speaking if google maps is up, and you are not over some API limit, you should be seeing that map on your site.

Okay thanks. I did check the logs last week but was about a half day too late to see the full day that the map was down. I didn't notice anything in the logs that seemed to be the culprit but it's possible that it was in there, I just couldn't see it because I couldn't view the logs from the entire day (the server only shows the last 300 logged items). Anyway, thanks for your help and I'll let you guys know if and when the map seems to go down again.

The api is hit once for each address when the job is run, but it's also hit each time a user searches by location using the form since the system has to get a lat/long for the end user's address as well.