smugmug down?

mercphoto · November 8, 2004

Anyone else noticing that smug mug is going down a lot the last few days?

wxwax · November 8, 2004

mercphoto wrote:

Anyone else noticing that smug mug is going down a lot the last few days?

Here's the thread. You've noticed more than one outage?

mercphoto · November 9, 2004

Outages

wxwax wrote:

Here's the thread. You've noticed more than one outage?

Yesterday morning and around lunch, yes. My client from Saturday complained to me yesterday about the site down, then sent me another email that she could not get in this morning either. Its not a huge deal, she's an understanding and patient person, and I work in hi-tech so I understand the hiccups. But I have 30 cub scout families who will start browsing the site in the next two days.

One thing I have noticed often over the months I've been here is that there are times you try to load a page and you get an empty page warning from the browser. Then you click refresh and it pops up. Like short-duration outages.

dkapp · November 9, 2004

mercphoto wrote:

Yesterday morning and around lunch, yes. My client from Saturday complained to me yesterday about the site down, then sent me another email that she could not get in this morning either. Its not a huge deal, she's an understanding and patient person, and I work in hi-tech so I understand the hiccups. But I have 30 cub scout families who will start browsing the site in the next two days.

One thing I have noticed often over the months I've been here is that there are times you try to load a page and you get an empty page warning from the browser. Then you click refresh and it pops up. Like short-duration outages.

Are you using safari? I think this is a bug with the browser, not the site. I get these a lot myself, but not just with Smugmug.

Dave

mercphoto · November 9, 2004

Safari

dkapp wrote:

Are you using safari? I think this is a bug with the browser, not the site. I get these a lot myself, but not just with Smugmug.

Dave

Yes, actually. I'm using Safari. Must be the culprit.

onethumb · November 9, 2004

mercphoto wrote:

Yesterday morning and around lunch, yes. My client from Saturday complained to me yesterday about the site down, then sent me another email that she could not get in this morning either. Its not a huge deal, she's an understanding and patient person, and I work in hi-tech so I understand the hiccups. But I have 30 cub scout families who will start browsing the site in the next two days.

One thing I have noticed often over the months I've been here is that there are times you try to load a page and you get an empty page warning from the browser. Then you click refresh and it pops up. Like short-duration outages.

Hmm, we had one outage (see the other thread) around 1:15pm Pacific, but that was it yesterday, AFAIK. And I track this stuff pretty closely.

I'd say we have about a 5 minute outage every two weeks right now, on average, and we're getting pretty close to narrowing the problem down to a fixable issue (this is with a software vendor, not with our own custom code, so the process isn't quite as easy).

That equals roughly 99.9975% uptime, which isn't terrible. That doesn't account for datacenter moves and rare flukes, so the actual number is still lower. I'd like to see that number improve, though, so I'm working on it pretty hard.

If I had to place us somewhere in the web heirarchy, I'd say we have better uptime than eBay, worse than Amazon, better than Gmail, worse than Google, better than Hotmail. Those are just guesses based on public opinion and sites which try to track that sort of stuff.

I'll keep trying to make sure all of those are "better than" rather than some "worse thans" in there, but it's a tough problem to solve. Computers and the software they run are inherently complex.

Don

onethumb · November 9, 2004

onethumb wrote:

Hmm, we had one outage (see the other thread) around 1:15pm Pacific, but that was it yesterday, AFAIK. And I track this stuff pretty closely.

I'd say we have about a 5 minute outage every two weeks right now, on average, and we're getting pretty close to narrowing the problem down to a fixable issue (this is with a software vendor, not with our own custom code, so the process isn't quite as easy).

That equals roughly 99.9975% uptime, which isn't terrible. That doesn't account for datacenter moves and rare flukes, so the actual number is still lower. I'd like to see that number improve, though, so I'm working on it pretty hard.

If I had to place us somewhere in the web heirarchy, I'd say we have better uptime than eBay, worse than Amazon, better than Gmail, worse than Google, better than Hotmail. Those are just guesses based on public opinion and sites which try to track that sort of stuff.

I'll keep trying to make sure all of those are "better than" rather than some "worse thans" in there, but it's a tough problem to solve. Computers and the software they run are inherently complex.

Don

Oh, and FYI, my goal is to be down less than 5 minutes *per year*. So we have a ways to go, but I think we can get there.

Stay tuned....

Don

mercphoto · November 9, 2004

Outages

onethumb wrote:

Hmm, we had one outage (see the other thread) around 1:15pm Pacific, but that was it yesterday, AFAIK. And I track this stuff pretty closely.

First off, I'm glad you guys take "complaints" so well.

I know one of my clients had trouble yesterday morning and again this morning. There may have been a short-term hiccup in the system, a problem with her ISP, who knows. And I'm not sure if she is the type of person to hit "refresh" at the first sign of trouble, or just give up the first time a page load fails. Her problem might have been the smugmug problem, or it might have been coincidental.

I know I occasionally have issues that require I immediately hit reload, but that appears to be a known Safari problem that affects numerous websites.

I work in this biz (verification of processors, to be exact), and frankly I'm amazed this stuff works as frequently as it does.

Now, if Apple would only fix iPhoto so that I don't feel like I have to buy iView Media Pro. :-D

dkapp · November 9, 2004

mercphoto wrote:

Now, if Apple would only fix iPhoto so that I don't feel like I have to buy iView Media Pro. :-D

Bought it & love it. I stopped using iPhoto when I bought my DSLR & started shooting raw.

Dave

photocat · November 9, 2004

dkapp wrote:

Bought it & love it. I stopped using iPhoto when I bought my DSLR & started shooting raw.

Dave

Buy Iview Media Pro or get
MorePhotoLibs
Version 1.0.1, september 20th, 2003.
© Luc Regnault 2003, luc.regnault@wanadoo.fr
http://regnault.luc.free.fr/
A spiffy little programs that lets you make as much libraries as you want.
I started liking iPhoto when I had it.
Now I sometimes use iPhoto and on other occasions iViewMediaPro.

onethumb · November 9, 2004

mercphoto wrote:

First off, I'm glad you guys take "complaints" so well.

I know one of my clients had trouble yesterday morning and again this morning. There may have been a short-term hiccup in the system, a problem with her ISP, who knows. And I'm not sure if she is the type of person to hit "refresh" at the first sign of trouble, or just give up the first time a page load fails. Her problem might have been the smugmug problem, or it might have been coincidental.

I know I occasionally have issues that require I immediately hit reload, but that appears to be a known Safari problem that affects numerous websites.

I work in this biz (verification of processors, to be exact), and frankly I'm amazed this stuff works as frequently as it does.

Now, if Apple would only fix iPhoto so that I don't feel like I have to buy iView Media Pro. :-D

FYI, we track a few smugmug URLs (including at least two dgrin participants) from 20 locations around the globe every 5 minutes, both for availability and to measure performance.

There weren't any outages we saw anywhere this morning, or yesterday morning, and our performance has been stable as well.

I've been wrong in the past, but if I were a betting man, I'd bet this particular problem didn't originate anywhere within our network or systems.

Don

onethumb · November 9, 2004

onethumb wrote:

FYI, we track a few smugmug URLs (including at least two dgrin participants) from 20 locations around the globe every 5 minutes, both for availability and to measure performance.

There weren't any outages we saw anywhere this morning, or yesterday morning, and our performance has been stable as well.

I've been wrong in the past, but if I were a betting man, I'd bet this particular problem didn't originate anywhere within our network or systems.

Don

I should mention that we poll and sample *within* our own network much more frequently than once every 5 minutes. The external checks are just to double-check that outside connectivity and inside connectivity look relatively the same. They always have, thus far.

Don

smugmug down?

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