Hiccups when viewing galleries

redshadow01

I've been having this issue with a more than a few of my galleries:

Standard view, thumbnails on the left, large image on the right, navigating through the gallery with the keyboard arrow keys. Load up a gallery, keep pressing "right arrow" to move forward, images load fine (I spend about 1 second on each image). All of a sudden there's an image that takes 5-10 seconds to load, and the flow of the gallery view is interrupted. I have to try to explain to my potential customers that its a one time glitch, but this happens almost every time I go through galleries in the above fashion.

There is a second glitch as well: the gallery thumbnails load properly about 95% of the time. Same idea as above, press "next" to flip to futher gallery pages, and all of a sudden a few thumbnails won't load, will just have black squares where images are supposed to be. This also happens with multiple galleries. The only solution is to reload the page, which again takes away from the viewing experience.

Tried with Firefox 3.0.10 and 3.5b4 on both Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 and Ubuntu 9.04. Also tried IE 7 on Vista, all combos of OS/browser have this problem. All tests done with clear cache/no cookies.

I am using a custom domain name, with the CNAME record pointing to domains.smugmug.com as per the setup instructions. My A record also points to the correct smugmug IP address, 208.79.45.23. The galleries I am showing to potential clients are all private, if that makes a difference.

Is anyone else having these problems? Are they localized to the Montreal, Quebec region (local Akamai server may have issues?) or are there other smugmug users in other locations that have experienced something similar?

thanks,
Red

Andy

Can you run a traceroute to us when you experience this problem?

redshadow01

Andy wrote:

Can you run a traceroute to us when you experience this problem? <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/ear.gif&quot; border="0" alt="" >

Sure...this is reproducible pretty much anytime of day. Here is a traceroute from my machine:

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6001]
Copyright (c) 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

tracert domains.smugmug.com

Tracing route to e1021.c.akamaiedge.net [96.7.116.77]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.0.254
2 6 ms 5 ms 5 ms 10.20.64.1
3 5 ms 5 ms 7 ms 24.200.227.85
4 6 ms 5 ms 5 ms ia-cnnu-bb04-ge13-1-0.vtl.net [216.113.122.14]
5 23 ms 23 ms 25 ms ia-cnnu-bb04-pos5-0-0-cpe074.vtl.net [216.113.122.74]
6 26 ms 27 ms 25 ms sl-crs1-chi-0-4-0-1.sprintlink.net [144.232.26.69]
7 25 ms 25 ms 25 ms sl-st21-chi-12-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.19.142]
8 24 ms 27 ms 25 ms chi-bb1-link.telia.net [213.248.84.225]
9 24 ms 25 ms 28 ms a96-7-116-77.deploy.akamaitechnologies.com [96.7.116.77]

Trace complete.

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6001]
Copyright (c) 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

tracert 208.79.45.23

Tracing route to www.smugmug.com [208.79.45.23]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.0.254
2 6 ms 6 ms 5 ms 10.20.64.1
3 8 ms 7 ms 8 ms 24.200.227.85
4 5 ms 5 ms 5 ms ia-cnnu-bb04-ge13-1-0.vtl.net [216.113.122.14]
5 24 ms 23 ms 23 ms ia-cnnu-bb04-pos5-0-0-cpe074.vtl.net [216.113.122.74]
6 25 ms 25 ms 25 ms sl-crs1-chi-0-1-0-2.sprintlink.net [144.232.26.11]
7 27 ms 25 ms 25 ms sl-st30-chi-0-8-5-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.19.234]
8 26 ms 27 ms 31 ms 144.232.19.246
9 91 ms 89 ms 89 ms SMUGMUG.gigabitethernet3-35.ar2.SJC2.gblx.net [64.214.196.246]
10 91 ms 88 ms 89 ms www.smugmug.com [208.79.45.23]

Trace complete.

Andy

OK can we get a line quality, too? You go here:
http://www.dslreports.com/linequality
Sign up and run the test. Registration there is free. After you run the test, copy the link to the results for us. That will let us know if there is an issue with the line preventing photos from arriving to our servers.

Post the link they give you.

redshadow01

Andy wrote:

OK can we get a line quality, too? You go here:
http://www.dslreports.com/linequality
Sign up and run the test. Registration there is free. After you run the test, copy the link to the results for us. That will let us know if there is an issue with the line preventing photos from arriving to our servers.

Post the link they give you.

Something must be getting in the way of the complete test...I had to enable "accept ping from WAN" on my router for this test, but still found errors...Here's the results of the test:

http://www.dslreports.com/linequality/nil/2523838

redshadow01

Andy wrote:

OK can we get a line quality, too? You go here:
http://www.dslreports.com/linequality
Sign up and run the test. Registration there is free. After you run the test, copy the link to the results for us. That will let us know if there is an issue with the line preventing photos from arriving to our servers.

Post the link they give you.

another tidbit I just noticed...when the large images don't load navigating with the arrow keys, the status bar in firefox says "transferring data from www.google-analytics.com". After a minute or so the image loads...

I have a pro account...any way you guys can just turn off all the google stuff in your gallery pages and just serve images, without needing to contact any third-party servers? One of the guidelines for fast-loading webpages is to not have any links to other domains, lest that slow down the viewing experience...which is what looks like is happening.

Andy

Two bad hops with packet loss in your line quality test
Have you got firewall software, antivirus, cookie blasting, anything running?

redshadow01

Andy wrote:

Two bad hops with packet loss in your line quality test
Have you got firewall software, antivirus, cookie blasting, anything running?

I have no such software running on both linux and windows. I am behind a dlink router and that's it...any other ideas?

Andy

redshadow01 wrote:

I have no such software running on both linux and windows. I am behind a dlink router and that's it...any other ideas?

Yeah unplug, wait a few seconds, and replugin your router and your cable modem, thus rebooting both. Sometimes that helps, too. Let us know?