Slideshow keeps stalling - Customization forum sent me here

Maggedy

My slide show keeps stalling and one of the gurus over on the customization board thinks he sees a problem on the SmugMug end of things.

Please see post http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=1360203#post1360203

and Help! Thank you

Andy

Try clearing your browser cache, I just watched your slideshow and no stall for me.

Maggedy

Andy wrote:

Try clearing your browser cache, I just watched your slideshow and no stall for me.

Nope. Stalled after the second picture and I've tested this on multiple computers over the last few days. Did you see jfriends last response in the thread I linked?

Maggedy

Maggedy wrote:

Nope. Stalled after the second picture and I've tested this on multiple computers over the last few days. Did you see jfriends last response in the thread I linked?

There is some kind of issue with my All Photos Gallery, which runs the slideshow. Twice today I've gone into it and only seen gray boxes. That's how it looks now. Should I dump the gallery and recreate it?

Andy

Maggedy wrote:

There is some kind of issue with my All Photos Gallery, which runs the slideshow. Twice today I've gone into it and only seen gray boxes. That's how it looks now. Should I dump the gallery and recreate it?

Try clearing your cache completely and reloading the gallery and the slideshow.

jfriend

Andy wrote:

Try clearing your cache completely and reloading the gallery and the slideshow.

Andy, I reproduced the stall in this thread on a perfectly empty browser cache. This is seriously a problem in Smugmug's infrastructure somewhere. If it works for you, then maybe it's an Akamai problem and only happening in some locations, but it IS a problem. Smugmug/Akamai is returning 404 not found on some of his images and the intolerant slideshow code isn't smart enough to skip an image if it can't download it. I can post the network trace that shows the 404 errors if need be.

FYI, this problem (which I reproduced 6 months ago also) would not even be noticed by most people if the slideshow code was tolerant enough to skip images that it has problems downloading. Instead, it seems to stall.

Maggedy

Andy wrote:

Try clearing your cache completely and reloading the gallery and the slideshow.

Still broken. In IE and Firefox. Do you think I need to completely recreate the All Photos Gallery?

Andy

jfriend wrote:

Andy,

Hi John, it may very well be a CDN issue. I can't reproduce, is all I'm saying. I've escalated.

Shizam

jfriend wrote:

Andy, I reproduced the stall in this thread on a perfectly empty browser cache. This is seriously a problem in Smugmug's infrastructure somewhere. If it works for you, then maybe it's an Akamai problem and only happening in some locations, but it IS a problem. Smugmug/Akamai is returning 404 not found on some of his images and the intolerant slideshow code isn't smart enough to skip an image if it can't download it. I can post the network trace that shows the 404 errors if need be.

FYI, this problem (which I reproduced 6 months ago also) would not even be noticed by most people if the slideshow code was tolerant enough to skip images that it has problems downloading. Instead, it seems to stall.

I'd like to see the trace, that'd be helpful.

jfriend

Shizam wrote:

I'd like to see the trace, that'd be helpful.

The trace stalled in a different place this time, but same issue (404 on an image fetch). It has my cookies in it so I don't want to post that publicly. I emailed it to Andy. Andy, can you please forward to Shizam?

Maggedy

jfriend wrote:

The trace stalled in a different place this time, but same issue (404 on an image fetch). It has my cookies in it so I don't want to post that publicly. I emailed it to Andy. Andy, can you please forward to Shizam?

Thanks, jfriend, Andy, and Shizam! I would really like to get this fixed.

Maggedy

Maggedy wrote:

Thanks, jfriend, Andy, and Shizam! I would really like to get this fixed.

Ok, I know there was a BIG crisis last night, but I'm hoping someone can take a look at this today. In the meantime I've taken down the broken slideshow and replaced it with a single picture. This is the text that was in my bio box. If you need to put it back in for testing, feel free.

<html>
********>
var ssConfig = {
AlbumID: '11592495',
newWindow: 'false',
bgColor: 'ffffff',
transparent: 'true',
splash: 'http://www.smugmug.com/img/ria/ShizamSlides/smugmug_black.png',
showLogo: 'false',
clickToImage: 'true',
randomize:'true',
showThumbs: 'false',
autoScaleSplash: "true",
showSpeed: 'false',
showButtons: 'false',
setSpeed: 'fast',
borderColor: '<000000>',
crossFadeSpeed: '350'
};

InsertStretchySlideshow(ssConfig);
</********
</html>

Maggedy

Maggedy wrote:

Ok, I know there was a BIG crisis last night, but I'm hoping someone can take a look at this today. In the meantime I've taken down the broken slideshow and replaced it with a single picture. This is the text that was in my bio box. If you need to put it back in for testing, feel free.

<html>
********>
var ssConfig = {
AlbumID: '11576028',
newWindow: 'false',
bgColor: 'ffffff',
transparent: 'true',
splash: 'http://www.smugmug.com/img/ria/ShizamSlides/smugmug_black.png',
showLogo: 'false',
clickToImage: 'true',
randomize:'true',
showThumbs: 'false',
autoScaleSplash: "true",
showSpeed: 'false',
showButtons: 'false',
setSpeed: 'fast',
borderColor: '<000000>',
crossFadeSpeed: '350'
};

InsertStretchySlideshow(ssConfig);
</********
</html>

ETA I changed the gallery the slideshow was pointing to because the All Photos Gallery was dead, nothing but gray squares. Maybe this will help.

ETA And now it is working! The question is, why did my All Photos Gallery "Die"? Why did all the links break?

Andy

Maggedy wrote:

ETA I changed the gallery the slideshow was pointing to because the All Photos Gallery was dead, nothing but gray squares. Maybe this will help.

This slideshow is working perfectly for me here. You ?

Maggedy

Andy wrote:

This slideshow is working perfectly for me here. You ?

Working great for me except now I cannot get to my Galleries page. The link goes nowhere. Why would that be?

ETA: OMG I am losing my mind. Now I don't see the slide show at all. What did I DO???

ETA Now everything is back. It broke when I enabled external links and easy share in one gallery so I could get the gallery ID for the new slideshow. I just reversed those changes and all is working. But Andy, why would that break the whole site?

jfriend

Andy wrote:

This slideshow is working perfectly for me here. You ?

Andy, did you guys actually fix something related to this problem or did some image serving problem just end up going away so now it's working?

Shizam

jfriend wrote:

Andy, did you guys actually fix something related to this problem or did some image serving problem just end up going away so now it's working?

Hey jFriend thanks for the trace, I was hoping I could shake some extra info out of it but couldn't. Regarding the 404's for you and some people but not others we had some site problems yesterday that spanned around the times you were getting 404's. These problems manifested in some images on the site being served and others not, seemingly at random, this was fixed late last night and now that everything is working for you (and us) your problems were probably related to that issue.

Sam

jfriend

Shizam wrote:

Hey jFriend thanks for the trace, I was hoping I could shake some extra info out of it but couldn't. Regarding the 404's for you and some people but not others we had some site problems yesterday that spanned around the times you were getting 404's. These problems manifested in some images on the site being served and others not, seemingly at random, this was fixed late last night and now that everything is working for you (and us) your problems were probably related to that issue.

Sam

Since it appears that when any single image in the slideshow has trouble being retrieved, the slideshow stalls and we've seen this issue happen previously (not just yesterday), would it not make sense to allow the slideshow code to continue on even though some images can't be retrieved? Wouldn't that be a more robust design that was more tolerant of occasional delivery issues? Wouldn't that make the slideshow "just work" even when there are occasional issues retrieving images and wouldn't that be good thing?

Shizam

jfriend wrote:

Since it appears that when any single image in the slideshow has trouble being retrieved, the slideshow stalls and we've seen this issue happen previously (not just yesterday), would it not make sense to allow the slideshow code to continue on even though some images can't be retrieved? Wouldn't that be a more robust design that was more tolerant of occasional delivery issues? Wouldn't that make the slideshow "just work" even when there are occasional issues retrieving images and wouldn't that be good thing?

Yup,
Already filed a bug for it.

jfriend

Shizam wrote:

Yup,
Already filed a bug for it.

Thanks.

Maggedy

My slideshow is stalling again (on every computer/browser I check it on).

jfriend and Shizam, is this the same problem as last time?

Thanks,

jfriend

Maggedy wrote: »

My slideshow is stalling again (on every computer/browser I check it on).

jfriend and Shizam, is this the same problem as last time?

Thanks,

Something is wrong on the Smugmug end of things. I see several images in the slideshow that return 404 not found and then the slideshow stops.

First, there should not be 404 errors. That is a problem somewhere at Smugmug or at their CDN. I'd guess it's an issue with the gallery index, but I'm just guessing.

Second, the slideshow should continue even though some images cannot be found. This issue has been reported before, but apparently not fixed yet.

This is something that needs to be fixed at Smugmug. I don't know what you could do to fix it yourself. To add a little more info, the gallery these images are coming from has virtual images in it from other galleries. It's URL is this: http://mairimages.smugmug.com/gallery/11691126_TXEm2#815822044_KxceM and when I got to view that gallery, I see images that do not display. Something is messed up in that gallery.

Here's a screenshot of the network trace. The items in red are 404, not found errors.

Maggedy

jfriend wrote: »

Something is wrong on the Smugmug end of things. I see several images in the slideshow that return 404 not found and then the slideshow stops.

First, there should not be 404 errors. That is a problem somewhere at Smugmug or at their CDN. I'd guess it's an issue with the gallery index, but I'm just guessing.

Second, the slideshow should continue even though some images cannot be found. This issue has been reported before, but apparently not fixed yet.

This is something that needs to be fixed at Smugmug. I don't know what you could do to fix it yourself. To add a little more info, the gallery these images are coming from has virtual images in it from other galleries. It's URL is this: http://mairimages.smugmug.com/gallery/11691126_TXEm2#815822044_KxceM and when I got to view that gallery, I see images that do not display. Something is messed up in that gallery.

Here's a screenshot of the network trace. The items in red are 404, not found errors.

Thank you. I deleted the broken images from that gallery, and it seems to be working again. However something really funky was up with that gallery. It was saying it had 230 images. I deleted 37 broken ones and now it reports 164 images. Huh? This is the second time a virtual gallery has completely broken on me. I had my slideshow pulling from another one called All Photos last time, and I had to delete it and rebuild it as the current one (Slideshow). Why are they breaking?

jfriend

Maggedy wrote: »

Thank you. I deleted the broken images from that gallery, and it seems to be working again. However something really funky was up with that gallery. It was saying it had 230 images. I deleted 37 broken ones and now it reports 164 images. Huh? This is the second time a virtual gallery has completely broken on me. I had my slideshow pulling from another one called All Photos last time, and I had to delete it and rebuild it as the current one (Slideshow). Why are they breaking?

It sounds like some sort of bug/corruption with virtual galleries. I wonder if your slideshow would be better off using a keyword feed rather than a virtual gallery.

Maggedy

Considering I haven't been putting keywords in on my photos, I would really like SmugMug to fix the bug!

jfriend

Maggedy wrote: »

Considering I haven't been putting keywords in on my photos, I would really like SmugMug to fix the bug!

You could either a keyword to every image in a particular virtual gallery (which would take only a few clicks using bulk keywording) or you can assign a keyword about as fast as you can collect a photo into a virtual gallery. It wouldn't be hard to start using it for your slideshow.

Maggedy

jfriend wrote: »

You could either a keyword to every image in a particular virtual gallery (which would take only a few clicks using bulk keywording) or you can assign a keyword about as fast as you can collect a photo into a virtual gallery. It wouldn't be hard to start using it for your slideshow.

Excellent. Thanks again for your help.