Slow earlier today - I know it's Monday, but...

Techman1

Was the system slow earlier today? I realize that it's Monday and a lot of uploading going on from the weekend, but I've had a couple of customers complain. Here's a quote from one of them regarding some 5x7's she was going to order;

"I just ordered the 5x7 of the team and it was real slow to process but I ordered it and it went through. When I went to order other photos not all of them showed up so I stopped at ordering this one for now."

This results in a loss of sales and hurts your potential for future business. Is there anything we can do about this on Monday's?

By the way, did the sales report system just get updated? It looks like it is sorting with the most current sales first now (which is really nice)! Or is this automatic after so many sales?

Thanks in advance for any feedback on the system from today. I just hate to have customers say they couldn't order because of the speed of my "they think it's my servers" system. Plus, if the thumbnails aren't refreshing quick enough when they try to order multiple....it just gets frustrating for everyone and costly for me :cry .

Regards,
Fred

Andy

Techman1 wrote:

Was the system slow earlier today? I realize that it's Monday and a lot of uploading going on from the weekend, but I've had a couple of customers complain. Here's a quote from one of them regarding some 5x7's she was going to order;

"I just ordered the 5x7 of the team and it was real slow to process but I ordered it and it went through. When I went to order other photos not all of them showed up so I stopped at ordering this one for now."

This results in a loss of sales and hurts your potential for future business. Is there anything we can do about this on Monday's?

By the way, did the sales report system just get updated? It looks like it is sorting with the most current sales first now (which is really nice)! Or is this automatic after so many sales?

Thanks in advance for any feedback on the system from today. I just hate to have customers say they couldn't order because of the speed of my "they think it's my servers" system. Plus, if the thumbnails aren't refreshing quick enough when they try to order multiple....it just gets frustrating for everyone and costly for me :cry .

Regards,
Fred

Hi Fred, thanks for posting. Ouch, sorry to hear this -

Actually, I can report that it's working rather zippy for me here - and I've been using the cart off and on all day doing some reorders and such. Yes, Sundays and Mondays are typically our busiest days - but in this case, I'd attribute your customer's experience to other factors....

Yeah, Onethumb made some changes to the reporting structure - after hearing from our pros that you'd like the order reversed! Check out the release notes blog. You can also subscribe via RSS and be notified the moment things get updated!

Techman1

Thanks Andy! I guess I zipped through OneThumb's update and didn't really notice the following:

"Pro: order summaries are now reported in reverse order. Most recent first.

Pro: The spreadsheet for your orders is now accurate. "

The first one is nice to have and this makes perfect sense. The second one is mandatory if we are to rely on these reports. So thanks to the Smugmug team for these latest updates/fixes.

Regarding my customer, I know they have a high speed link so I don't think that has anything to do with them. I've noticed this same thing in the past, so while you don't believe it is the Smugmug servers I would tend to lean the other way. I was in the cart a few times today too and it seemed to be running okay (not blazing by any means), but I'm just concerned as I hate to lose any sales due to this continued problem on Sundays and Mondays. While the slideshow feature is nice (I don't use it), I wonder if it isn't causing some of the slow downs they our customer base is experiencing at times?

Anyone else have any reports today regarding slow downs?

Thanks in advance to all!

Fred

Baldy

Hey Fred,

My guess is there was a slowdown in access from your area to our servers for awhile. We used to hear about this more than we do now because we have multiple bandwidth providers coming into our datacenter and we didn't used to. So if one slows down the systems revert to the fastest one. But sometimes an outage in one can overload another, etc. Here are the graphs we look at (this one is not from today):



You might see Google being screaming fast on a day when access to Smugmug is slow because we can't replicate your photos in as many places as Google puts its datacenters.

I hope this helps and I'm sorry for the slowness you were seeing.

Thanks,
Chris