Options
Smugmug is quite slow....
igoforit
Registered Users Posts: 43 Big grins
Thanks to the other poster for refering to Alexa.com regarding the slow response times of smugmug.com. The answer was that nothing could be done about it because it is a picture site. OK, but so is pbase and photo.net, so let´s compare:
Site Stats for smugmug.com:
Site Stats for pbase.com:
I like the looks of smugmug, but the feel could be much snappier. It is not just an issue with statistics, it is an issue in how I perceive the responsiveness of smugmug.com.
Regards,
Jos (from Belgium)
Site Stats for smugmug.com:
- Traffic Rank for smugmug.com: 4,817 (
3,512)
- Speed: Slow (80% of sites are faster), Avg Load Time: 3.4 Seconds (what's this?)
- Other sites that link to this site: 44
Site Stats for pbase.com:
- Traffic Rank for pbase.com: 565 (
20) - Speed: Average (55% of sites are faster), Avg Load Time: 1.9 Seconds (what's this?)
- Other sites that link to this site: 1,326
- Traffic Rank for photo.net: 2,772 (688)
- Speed: Slow (68% of sites are faster), Avg Load Time: 2.5 Seconds (what's this?)
- Other sites that link to this site: 1,337
I like the looks of smugmug, but the feel could be much snappier. It is not just an issue with statistics, it is an issue in how I perceive the responsiveness of smugmug.com.
Regards,
Jos (from Belgium)
0
Comments
Richard
In general, we're very fast. We track our speed to deliver pages from more than 20 different locations, on different ISPs, all over the world, every 5 minutes. We compare very favorably to the Top 100 web sites in the world, indeed, we're faster than a large portion of them. (The Top 100 is based on traffic, so it includes sites like eBay, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, etc).
There are specific days on which we get overloaded, though. (I'd say "slightly" in comparison to pbase's problems, but I don't want to downplay the issue. Our ability to handle unusual days is definitely an issue) When we get a major award in a magazine, we usually have a few hours where we're slower (but still available and not painful) than I wish we were.
But to be completely fair and honest, we're comparing apples to oranges here. We're the only photo sharing site that shows both tiny thumbnails and reasonably large photos on the same page. This results in slower page loads, particularly for modem users (of which we have hundreds of thousands, easily). Alexa doesn't notice or care about that, they just care how many seconds it takes for the page to load to the finish. The extra big image on smugmug results in a slower page load.
I want to stress again that I take speed complaints very seriously, and we're constantly both optimizing our software and adding new hardware to speed things up. We'll continue to do so on a regular basis, and I'm optimistic that soon we won't even see marginal slowdowns on unusually heavy traffic days.
Finally, I'd like to put forward my personal opinion that speed is very important, but stability, uptime and availability are more important. I think we're probably the market leader, compared to sites like Pbase and Flickr, in reliability these days. I'd choose to have my photos be slightly slower, but always on, than lightning fast some of the time and not available the rest. We can still do better at this, but we're also doing fairly well. These days we essentially have zero minutes per month of downtime other than rare scheduled maintenance windows. *knock on wood*
Don
So...in other words...me too.
"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."-Hunter S.Thompson
We'd love so very much to be faster. But just to understand the tradeoffs we'd have to make:
Alexa is measuring the total time to download a typical page. A typical page for smugmug is Elegant gallery stye where we place 15 thumbnails on a page and a 600-pixel medium-sized image, so we place about 50% more image bytes on the page than PBase does.
We made the decision to go higher image quality, which means another 15% per image. See http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=6016 .
PBase is on the East Coast and we're on the west, so you have to pay the additional 80ms latency per server request that you feel even more acutely in Belgium.
Far as we can measure, our servers are actually responding slightly more quickly than PBase's, but I know that's not translating into high perceived speed for you.
I know, I know... This sounds like excuses and denial...
I wish I had better answers for you.
Baldy
At this moment I still prefer the quality of Smugmug against the one or two seconds faster times of other sites (which, in my opinion and as already mentioned before, is a comparison between apples and oranges)
gspep.smugmug.com & steendorp.smugmug.com
FB: www.facebook.com/peter.perdaen - Youtube: www.youtube.com/user/1150GSPEP/videos
Baldy, Onethumb, (and others)
Thanks for your answers and you have indeed reassured me that you do and will do whatever it takes to give us the best possible response times. I am impressed with your response in this forum! Thanks for that!
I did some additional checks, and guess what. I have 2 PCs, both running XP and both running the same version of IE. One is an old 800 Mhz PC and the other is a 3 GHz PC. Strangely enough, the slow PC is much faster with smugmug than the fast PC. So, there must be something different in my PCs, and I don´t have a clue where to look for it. Yesterday, I spent a lot of time on smugmug with the 3 GHz PC and I attributed the poor response times wrongly to smugmug where in fact, it must have to do with my PC.
I actually can see a different behaviour.
On the 3 GHz PC, the screen every time completely refreshes (e.g. all thumbnails as well as the larger picture) while on the 800 Mhz PC, only the new larger picture will refresh when I select a new thumbnail. The same when I go back to a previous page, it looks like one PC is caching and the other is always reloading. Anyone having an idea where I have to check for a setting that must be wrong on one of my PCs?
Thanks in advance, and apologies for having wrongly suggested that there was a response problem with smugmug.
Jos
I looked a bit further into it and cleaned my temporary files, and now things seem to be must faster.
Sorry for possibly having created a wrong impression due to my own mistake.
Regards,
Jos
ginger (I have XP)
Baldy
All feed back is welcomed!!
http://www.dipphoto.com/
:lust :lust
But ....
It is in my experience almost too slow for me. It doesn't matter which PC I use or how I set my browser (cache). From my location (The Netherlands) it takes between 3-5 seconds before the next photo is displayed. I'm not talking about the time it takes to load the page with the tumbnails, but just the time it takes to display the next photo in a gallery.
At Pbase this is much much faster; in other words very comfortable to browser through the galleries. I know that Pbase is somehow closer to my location (fewer 'hops'), but that doesn't explain the big speed difference.
Isn't there any explanation?. Is it because smugmug has more users/photo's online?.
I have an account with smugmug for just over a year now and am satisfied with what it offers, like the unlimited storage space. But, I'm almost thinking of joining Pbase, just because the speed at there is so much better. The only thing that keeps me from moving right away is the limited storage space at Pbase.
I hope that the speed will improve ..... I surely hope so.
Cheers
-don
hi dmb,
could you provide details as to your internet connection, and the link to sites/galleries that you are finding to be slow?
thank you.
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
James.
http://www.jamesjweg.com
Here are some recent benchmarks for time to download equivalent gallery pages for each, by geography:
Note how the vertical scales are different. Yellow means errors are being produced, so PBase was showing as unavailable from Dallas and smugmug was sucking in Helsinki.
Generally, these benchmarks keep coming back that we're close but slightly faster on average, except our image sizes are 20% larger (less compression).
So I don't know what's happening at your particular location but I'd love to because if you're affected, there must be others who are too.
I'm using a fast cable connection. Don't know exactly what speed it is right now, but I can download from an European server with about 470Kb/s. Downloading from a server at the other side of the Atlantic is of course slower (mostly about 160Kb/s).
I've just tested the speed with the following gallery:
http://heinz.smugmug.com/gallery/483715/1/19719469
Switching from one photo to an other takes around 4 to 5 seconds now.
Just after that I did the same test at pbase with the following gallery:
http://www.pbase.com/lightrider/image/38206766
Here it takes about 2 to 2,5 seconds to switch to another photo.
Hope this gives you an idea.
(I forgot to say that, before I did the test, I cleared my browsers's cache)
First of all, those two pages aren't nearly a fair comparison. The first has 11 photos on it, and the 2nd has a single photo. Despite many of the photos being small on that first page, to a web browser (especially one on a fast connection), each of those connections to get those images is "expensive" (it takes a lot more time).
It would be more fair, but not completely apples-to-apples, to compare this page instead: http://heinz.smugmug.com/gallery/483715/1/19719469/Medium
Don
thanks - there are many variables involved, including what don mentions just above ... i can tell you that i look at these galleries and the shot-to-shot response time, size = Large, is about 1-2 seconds. i'm on a fast broadband connection. and i'm in nyc. i'm sure there are regional variables that come into play, as well. lord knows i'm not smart enough for that stuff, but don sure is....
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
Early on, I optimized smugmug for broadband (DSL, Cable, people's high-speed office connections, etc), assuming broadband penetration was high enough.
We rapidly discovered that, while our customers use high-speed connections a lot, their friends and family browsing photos did not - they used slow modems. And they'd complain (loudly!) about our speed.
I went into a cave for a month, trying to learn all the optimization, caching, and speed tricks that the various web browsers use. The final decision we made was to dramatically speed up modem browsing at a small penalty for broadband customers.
For example, if a page was taking 60 seconds over a modem, it now took something like 30 seconds instead. The same page over a broadband connection that took 0.5 seconds now took 0.7 seconds instead. We considered this a fair compromise, especially because the pages still felt lightning-fast to broadband customers. 0.2 seconds is pretty negligible if you're saving most of your browsers an extra 30 seconds per page. Best of all, the loud complaining ceased entirely.
While I don't have a modem hooked up right this second, I can almost promise you that browsing smugmug on a modem connection is dramatically faster than pbase is, as a general rule, even given our larger photos.
Why and how this works is an exercise left up to the reader, but it's a complicated mix of compression and caching, and we're constantly tweaking it. (Some enhancements went out last night, actually). We have some other things in the works to speed stuff up even more.
Another dramatic speed increase can be had by moving to a modern web browser like Firefox. Internet Explorer is many years old, long in the tooth, and very slow. Firefox will bring a smile to your lips.
Finally, as has been mentioned before, our photos are simply higher quality and thus, take longer to transmit.
Don
I tried the link and times are not different. Maybe a tiny bit faster, but still at least 4 seconds per photo.
Firefox absolutely rules, with the exception of the fact that the sweet Java uploader that is provided will only "zoom out" as far as my drives, and not to my desktop, which is where the folders are for my different cameras / scannings.
Living in So Cal, I can't complain at all. What I like the most is that when Smugmug goes down on me, I know all I have to do is sit tight for a few minutes and it'll be right back, instead of hours on end. I've literally been able to just get up and go to the bathroom and smugmug's okay by the time I get back.
PS. on the topic of image quality; I must say I'm very satisfied but every now and then a unique image such as this one will give me almost hideous trouble:
Is there any way to "refresh" the thumbnail? I could have sworn there used to be...
-matt-
My SmugMug Portfolio • My Astro-Landscape Photo Blog • Dgrin Weddings Forum
Hello, neighbour!:-)
There is no direct button for that I know of, but I think you can use a two step process.
You can use "zoom thumbnail" feature to change it, and then unzoom it back to change it to a full image.
HTH
Actually, it can. The "zoom out to desktop" thing is actually a Microsoft hack. The top level of your PC isn't your Desktop. You can find it, though, by going here:
C:\Documents and Settings\YOURNAME\Desktop
Hope that helps!
Don
Firstly, can I say that I don't expect much from Smugmug speed-wise - I use it for the unlimited capacity mainly and its reliability.
However, the smugmug team seem to view it as important, so I'll contribute from Reading, UK:
This site is a lot slower than pbase!:cry
If you're comparing loading a page of photos, the speeds are similar. However, if you're loading up a page of text, such as the control panel or customise gallery, it's a lot slower (about twice as long to load). This makes it painful if you're wanting to, say, move galleries around or change settings.
You can show me all the stats you like, but IMHO, when I load the site, it's definitely a lot slower than pbase. I'm using a broadband connection, have deleted my temporary files and its still as slow (minimum 18 seconds per page).