idea to balance server load with help of API

rainforest1155

There's a discussion going on in the support forum on how to reduce the peak server loads of SM upload servers.

JamesJWeg wrote:

I would gladly use a tool that I set and it waited until your servers told it to send, managing upload realtime.

One idea by James was to for example queue an upload in S*E, enabling the 'server-balance'-option and then hitting upload. Now S*E would connect to the upload server and indicating that it has got a job queued just waiting for the upload server to say 'go!'. When the server's load is not so high anymore it simply let's S*E now this and S*E starts to upload.
That way long processing times can be shortened in a long run. Possible users of this function would be people not needing their pictures online now, but who can wait a little in order to improve the overall SM performance.
Of course this cries for a new API function.

What do you think?

Sebastian

rutt

Here is a variation on this theme for programs using the API. Suppose there was a Priority call. For example, Priority("Batch") Then the server could know to process the uploads (or whatever) from this particular session only when it had free resources. Of course there are tons of variations on the different priority; it depends on what makes sense from the point of view of the smugmug system.