Slow Server?

danny d

Is it me or is Smugmug painfully slooooow lately??

Andy

danny d wrote:

Is it me or is Smugmug painfully slooooow lately??

Hi Danny,
These usually turn out to be local connection type issues - we can help trouble shoot, please email directly to our help desk so our Support Heroes can help you, okay?

http://www.smugmug.com/help/emailreal

johng

Andy wrote:

Hi Danny,
These usually turn out to be local connection type issues - we can help trouble shoot, please email directly to our help desk so our Support Heroes can help you, okay?

http://www.smugmug.com/help/emailreal

No offense, Andy, but that excuse is getting worn.

I've been having problems the last 2 days getting to control pannel and such (just like the other thread states and no one from smugmug ever commented on).

How is it that any other interent site works fine - but my 'local connection problems' only affect me getting to smugmug pages?

It's time to give that tired excuse up. The problem isn't the rest of the world's local connetions.

For what it's worth to other posters I live in Northeast Ohio. Does everyone else having this problem live in Northeast Ohio too?

To do my part I've sent an email to the help desk. I'll re-post when I hear back.

Andy

johng wrote:

To do my part I've sent an email to the help desk. I'll re-post when I hear back.

That's the ticked

We're the same Support Her0es here and on the desk btw

So, what we'll ask for is a traceroute so we can diagnose the problem - and yes, they usually are connection issues that are temporary - we have millions visiting the site, every day, with no slowness complaints.

I know this doesn't help you - and believe me, our heroes want to get to the bottom of it.

johng

Andy wrote:

That's the ticked

We're the same Support Her0es here and on the desk btw

So, what we'll ask for is a traceroute so we can diagnose the problem.

OK - is this something I need to do? Or something that happens behind the scenes?

Also - maybe you can help me on this one. From an HTML standpoint, the control panel would seem a much simpler page than say a gallery page with thumb-nails (i.e. more data to send across the connection with a gallery page). If the issue was a communication link - why would it manifest in a a screen with less data to exchange? Or are you passing a lot of javascripts on the control panel page?

Andy

johng wrote:

OK - is this something I need to do? Or something that happens behind the scenes?

Also - maybe you can help me on this one. From an HTML standpoint, the control panel would seem a much simpler page than say a gallery page with thumb-nails (i.e. more data to send across the connection with a gallery page). If the issue was a communication link - why would it manifest in a a screen with less data to exchange? Or are you passing a lot of javascripts on the control panel page?

Hi, Control panel access is a different bunch of servers. We've asked our engineers to look into that.

As to traceroutes, it's best if you email our help desk and converse directly with our Support Heroes there. http://www.smugmug.com/help/emailreal

Thanks

johng

current status. Here is the email I got back from support:
Hi John,
Thank you for your email. I'm sorry to hear you are experiencing slow access to the control panel, etc. I, too, have been experiencing the same. Our engineers are aware of it, and are looking into it to see what the problem might be. Sadly, it does not affect everyone, so it is much more difficult to pin down. However, they are definitely looking into it.
I'm terribly sorry for the inconvenience.
All the best,
Barb

Looks like they're not interested in a traceroute. But just thought I'd post this response for others following along.

danny d

Thanks Andy
Control panel is usually slow but my main problem is with the slide show features. I always downsize my images to around 1mb a photo in an attempt to help speed up the slide show. The slides seem to take 5-6 seconds to change even at the 3 sec setting... Any advise or tips on how to increase the speed of my slideshows, while still allowing for a large enough file size for large printing?

Thank you.

TalkieT

And here's part of the problem...

Andy wrote:

[snip...]we have millions visiting the site, every day, with no slowness complaints.[snipped comment about definitely wanting to fix the problem]

Andy - I'm aware that the websitepulse.com testing I setup was artificial (single thread, no client side caching etc, no gzip compression etc) - BUT it is showing that for a first time, single threaded load, my site from new Zealand takes about 30-40 seconds, compared to 4-8 seconds from the US.

This is _NOT_ an artifact of the distance or worse latencies involved in a pacific hop - other sites are consistently fast. Add to that the fact that a couple of months ago, Smugmug felt fast. What the people on these boards are complaining about is a greatly noticable reduction in performance from some geographic locations.

As for the claim that you have millions of visitors a day and no slowness complaints... a) You are getting some slowness complaints... and b) How many people out there are experiencing slowness and ARE JUST NOT COMPLAINING TO YOU? Either they can't be bothered or they don't make the smugmug connection as they are often looking at a customised site (For your high traffic sites I would imagine).

I'm confident Smugmug has some sort of performance and availability monitoring, but is it sufficiently distributed to catch what's been happening for the last few weeks? I'd say probably not, since Smugmug hasn't accepted that there's a systemic problem affecting a subset of users, and the FIRST response to someone complaining about speed here is that it's usually a local connection issue...

With an undiagnosed, intermittent problem affecting some of your users, can you give us any confidence that Smugmug are seriously looking into this?

I'm afraid that at the moment, a combination of the "Millions of visits and no complaints" and "probably a local connection issue" type of responses indicate to me that Smugmug isn't taking the performance complaints by some users seriously.

A generic comment that doesn't accept there may be a Smugmug (or close to Smugmug) based problem is going to further cement my opinion that there simply aren't enough complaints yet and nothing's been done on your end.

Sorry for the harsh words - Smugmug has traditionally been amazingly responsive to problems and issues - that's part of the reason it's so hard to accept that nothing is apparently been done on your end this time.

Cheers - Neil G
www.nzsnaps.com

Andy

TalkieT wrote:

As for the claim that you have millions of visitors a day and no slowness complaints.

Yeah Neil - I misspoke.

I should have said "very few" slowness complaints. But either way - it doesn't matter - slow for you sucks and we're working on it. I don't have an immediate answer to give you but I know that our engineers are looking at ways to make it fast for all.