Howdy,

I’m trying to figure out how often JBidWatch refreshes and whether I can control this function. Maybe I’m not looking in the right config file but I just can’t seem to see it.

Help please?

Thanks,

Bubba

Greetings,

It’s hardcoded, unfortunately, to 30 minutes.

I can make it configurable, if you think it’d be useful. Another timer like that is the update of the users sign-in cookie from eBay, which also happens every 30 minutes. That, however, is less configurable, because they time-out portions of the cookie (specifically the adult access) every ~45 minutes.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Morgan,

Thanks for your reply.

I think that my direction here is being able to more closely monitor auctions towards the closing. Seems like being able to to configure times (maybe down to 5 second intervals?) would be helpful in the decision-making process.

Then again…I probably spend too much money on eBay anyhow…:—)

Bubba

Greetings,
Ah, okay, sorry… I thought you meant the time sync to make sure that the JBidwatcher time is linked with eBay’s time.

In the last half hour of an auction, items drop to 1-minute updates. This is mainly because any faster, and eBay might have an issue with it. Also because on most lower speed connections, if you have 5-10 items which close in the last half hour, you will take more than a minute updating all of them…

If you brought it down to a 5 second update time, if you have multiple items closing in the last half hour, some might get starved for update time, unless you have a very fast connection.

The code for handling the update is in AuctionEntry, and again, the update-speed is hardcoded to once per minute, once it gets into the last 30 minutes. I can make both configurable relatively straightforwardly, but I’d really urge against updating too rapidly.

In fact, although it’s the easiest to do, I’d probably not make the ‘start fast update’ time configurable. This is because eBay is very, very vehement that automated tools not hit their site too quickly. The last half hour should be fine, since that’s when snipers usually come in.

JBidwatcher keeps internally a ‘time delta’ of how long it takes to retrieve a page from the auction site, so it has an idea how far before the ‘real’ snipe time it has to start preparing a snipe. This value might be useful for determining the fastest possible ‘re-update’ time, based on the number of items closing in the last half hour. I’d have to display it on the dialog that allows you to change the update time, and warn you if you’re selecting too fast an update time…

It’s worth keeping track of as a feature idea, definitely.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Morgan,

Perfecto. I believe that your last response has completely answered any issues raised in my initial request. My apologies for any confusion I may have caused.

One minute updates during that last 1/2 hour of an auction work fine! (I just couldn’t find any info relating to those times in the documentation)

Thanks,

Bubba