Timed out...

Jeffro · May 17, 2006

I use the drag and drop option (formerly the beta version), always, and have been wondering this for quite awhile.....why does it time out, everytime at what appears to be 12:30am central time? It doesn't seem to matter how long I've been uploading or anything. I've talked to one other Smugger here where I live and the same thing happens to him.

How in the world can I do an overnight upload, without staying up to do it? It isn't really an unlimited upload if it times me out..anyone:dunno

Am I missing something:scratch

Baldy · May 17, 2006

That's a good question, Jeffro. Do you have any problem getting through to SmugMug for other jobs at that time that you know of?

I suspect it's a networking issue but is your PC or Mac doing anything at that time that's scheduled and sucks all the resources (virus scan, etc.)?

It might be interesting to try an uploader like SendToSmugMug, which seems to be incredibly error-resistant.

onethumb · May 17, 2006

Jeffro wrote:

I use the drag and drop option (formerly the beta version), always, and have been wondering this for quite awhile.....why does it time out, everytime at what appears to be 12:30am central time? It doesn't seem to matter how long I've been uploading or anything. I've talked to one other Smugger here where I live and the same thing happens to him.

How in the world can I do an overnight upload, without staying up to do it? It isn't really an unlimited upload if it times me out..anyone

Am I missing something

There are a lot of things that could be going on:

- often ISPs do work on their networks after midnight. This commonly involves "bouncing" (briefly shutting off and turning back on) connections and routing. Your Cable/DSL/whatever ISP might be doing this on a regular basis.

- Lots of people's PCs do "cleanup" stuff late at night, especially if you have any antivirus/anti-adware tools, disk optimization tools, etc. They could be causing problems.

- Late night is a common time period for other network providers on the net to do be doing work, too, so it could be an upstream provider from your ISP that's bouncing it.

Don

dmc · May 17, 2006

onethumb wrote:

There are a lot of things that could be going on:

- often ISPs do work on their networks after midnight. This commonly involves "bouncing" (briefly shutting off and turning back on) connections and routing. Your Cable/DSL/whatever ISP might be doing this on a regular basis.

- Lots of people's PCs do "cleanup" stuff late at night, especially if you have any antivirus/anti-adware tools, disk optimization tools, etc. They could be causing problems.

- Late night is a common time period for other network providers on the net to do be doing work, too, so it could be an upstream provider from your ISP that's bouncing it.

Don

don, I think you forgot one point... where you say "we are going to fix our uploaders so that they are error resistant..."

onethumb · May 17, 2006

dmc wrote:

don, I think you forgot one point... where you say "we are going to fix our uploaders so that they are error resistant..."

Wish we could, but alas, we don't have the source code for the drag & drop uploader.

So it's really "we are going to continue to try to get the owners of that tool to fix them so they're error resistant".

However, that's not really a great solution either. If his connection or PC is somehow causing transmission problems, they'll likely still fail even if we retry a sane number of times. Obviously, we can't infinitely retry, and if the connection is broken for more than a few seconds, we may be out of luck.

SendToSmugMug automatically retries, I believe, and Nik's Star Explorer probably does as well.

Don

Jeffro · May 17, 2006

Thanks for the quick reply.

My PC isn't doing any scheduled tasks at that time. I wondered if it was a provider (Comcast) issue, but I was sitting at the PC when it did it last night, and the "lost connection" box appeared, but nothing else changed, I still had my connection to the uploader page, so I kind of thought it couldn't be Comcast. But then again I'm not a computer god, so I could be wrong:D .

If nobody else is experiencing this I'll assume it's my provider having a "hiccup" or something

Anyone, anyone...

dmc · May 17, 2006

onethumb wrote:

Wish we could, but alas, we don't have the source code for the drag & drop uploader.

So it's really "we are going to continue to try to get the owners of that tool to fix them so they're error resistant".

However, that's not really a great solution either. If his connection or PC is somehow causing transmission problems, they'll likely still fail even if we retry a sane number of times. Obviously, we can't infinitely retry, and if the connection is broken for more than a few seconds, we may be out of luck.

SendToSmugMug automatically retries, I believe, and Nik's Star Explorer probably does as well.

Don

wow, that was quite illuminating.....

I think smugmug should consider licensing either Star Explorer or SendToSmugmug and make it part of smugmug....

Jeffro · May 17, 2006

I've sent my question to Comcast as well, so I'll see if they have an answer, and let you know. I'll bet they don't answer as fast as Smug

!

onethumb · May 17, 2006

dmc wrote:

wow, that was quite illuminating..... I think smugmug should consider licensing either Star Explorer or SendToSmugmug and make it part of smugmug....

Most people aren't interested in installing an external application. They want something embedded in their browser that they don't have to install. So making Star*Explorer or SendToSmugMug a "part" of SmugMug has limited value. But we are actively directing customers to STS.

If someone wants to build us a better one, we'd pay handsomely for it. For now, this is the best we've got.

Don

mrcoons · May 22, 2006

I understand the necessity of the changes discussed here and I fully understand the problems with vendor utilities but for me the 'upload' results I'm getting right now are not very good. Let me cover where I've been and what I've tried.

I have never liked and tried to avoid the "Universal Drag & Drop" uploader. It has always seemed slower than the other methods and it's not very reliable. The usual problem is that it hangs up and nothing uploads. Or it says it uploaded the images but they never show up.

"Send to Smugmug" doesn't seem to work for me for some reason. I see the 'Send to Smugmug' in the right click menu but then I get a window that wants me to select a tool. Which tool would that be? I never have seen the window listed in the help screen. (I know I have .NET installed but I am not positive what version I am on. I believe I have 2.0 installed.)

I saw others in Dgrin having this same problem that talked about "Star*Explorer". So I downloaded & installed it. At first usage it appears to be a workable (if poorly documented) tool. Except the second time I tried to use it I could not figure out how to get my photos to the correct album as the album I wanted to upload them to did not show up in S*E! Nor did I see a method for refreshing the directory (at least not one that worked). This is most likely ignorance of the tool on my part but I could not find a way around it, nor any documentation that was of any assistance.

Which leaves the standard upload which doesn't help when you have several hundred images to upload.

For me, at least, the old ActiveX uploader worked the best, it's sad to say.

Timed out...

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