The webserver doesn't communicate with Google when generating the map, that's done in the browser.
I've noticed that Chrome does some strange things in unforeseen circumstances causing problems for web servers, though.
adam.
------ Original Message ------
Sent: 12/2/2014 12:27:25 AM
Subject: [Observium] Observium and Google downtime
We use the Google Map API, and it appeared that Google was unreachable here for several minutes. In that time, our Observium box ground to a halt due to all the PHP processes hanging on what I can only guess were map API calls. Once Google came back the machine became responsive again after all the processes finally cleared out.