SM Down and/or extremely slow

RBrogen · January 17, 2010

Is there a known issue with SM tonight? It has been wicked slow loading and I've gotten a few pages can't be display due to time out.

mlee · January 17, 2010

Same here.

edited to add:

C:\Users\mike>tracert smugmug.com

Tracing route to smugmug.com [208.79.45.23]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms 1 ms 2 ms 192.168.1.1
2 12 ms 10 ms 11 ms 10.90.0.1
3 70 ms 10 ms 10 ms acr01gldlca-gbe-1-21.rvsd.ca.charter.com [96.34.
96.134]
4 18 ms 10 ms 9 ms 96-34-96-38.static.unas.ca.charter.com [96.34.96
.38]
5 12 ms 15 ms 12 ms bbr01mtpkca-tge-0-0-0-6.mtpk.ca.charter.com [96.
34.2.24]
6 14 ms 25 ms 16 ms prr01lsanca-tge-1-1.lsan.ca.charter.com [96.34.3
.5]
7 20 ms 26 ms 22 ms tge12-3.fr3.lax.llnw.net [69.28.144.241]
8 30 ms 21 ms 23 ms tge9-3.fr4.sjc.llnw.net [69.28.172.54]
9 33 ms 35 ms 21 ms smugmug.ge4-1.fr3.sjc.llnw.net [208.111.152.82]

10 20 ms 37 ms 31 ms www.smugmug.com [208.79.45.23]

Trace complete.

funcrunch · January 17, 2010

Same problem here (pages very slow to load, connection resets). I checked the status update blog first before coming here.

timnosenzo · January 17, 2010

same here

god-like · January 17, 2010

same here... and I know its not me... I get 18ms to other places and around 30Mbps download speed.

Montec · January 17, 2010

god-like wrote:

same here... and I know its not me... I get 18ms to other places and around 30Mbps download speed.

Same problem here.
First time I needed to use it in weeks and it's broke

Has it been reported to SM tech support yet?

RBrogen · January 17, 2010

Damn can't be worse timing AGAIN! I'm prep'ing prints for my first major competition.

Oscarc · January 17, 2010

Yep, it's PAINFULLY slow right now for me too.

BELphotos · January 17, 2010

Ditto on east coast - new jersey - comcast network. actually getting two photos on same page when making larger, then blank.

Montec · January 17, 2010

Ugg...I am supposed to show a short video at 8:00PM PST. This is not going to go well.

I better get to work and burn it to a DVD :cry :cry

zacHer0 · January 17, 2010

Yes - we are temporarily down but should be back up soon. We're checking into the problem and will update this thread as well as our status blog http://smugmug.wordpress.com/.

Montec · January 17, 2010

Lot's of these lately I see, not like SM's usual steady service.

Uncle Frank · January 17, 2010

These "read only" occurances are becoming commonplace. It's only 1/17, but it's the 6th time it has happened this month. Is there an underlying problem, or has smugmug become topheavy... a victim of its own success? Where are our heros?

Andy · January 17, 2010

Uncle Frank wrote:

These "read only" occurances are becoming commonplace. It's only 1/17, but it's the 6th time it has happened this month. Is there an underlying problem, or has smugmug become topheavy... a victim of its own success? Where are our heros?

Where they always are, Frank - right here, and everywhere. Our help desk is open 365 days a year. Our Ops people never stop working.

They are on it and working the issue. We'll update the status blog asap.

We're not 'top heavy' Frank - we're just working though some Operational things. SmugMug is as strong as ever.

We're sorry for the Read Only Mode - engineers are trying to restore full service asap.

StevenSzabo · January 17, 2010

yeah...this is getting annoying.

your site is only worth anything to me if it is consistent. Being inconsistent like this makes me look unprofessional. And thus makes me look at other hosting options.

RBrogen · January 17, 2010

zacHer0 wrote:

Yes - we are temporarily down but should be back up soon. We're checking into the problem and will update this thread as well as our status blog http://smugmug.wordpress.com/.

SM I've stuck by you guys through a lot of growing pains but this is seriously making me have to consider moving. Just looking back over the past 60 days and there have been entirely way too many issues and a majority appear to be occurring right after a "Scheduled Maintenance". Several months ago the CEO got on here and mia culpa'd and said that he was going to make sure that this type of stuff stopped happening. It appears that this has not worked or taken place but I cannot build my business model around a solution that is a "sometime solution". My clients and prospects don't want to hear about some Level 3 NOC issue at Google or Amazon issues. I understand first hand the complexities with providing this type of service as I am a 25 year veteran in the technology industry and am CTO for a 57 location international company in my non-photography day job. I can tell you I'd be out on my ear if I had this many outages. Can someone, obviously post-mortum provide insight as to what is going to be done about the service, maintenance issues and the forgetting a "step" in the recovery process? Yes I'm frustrated.

Andy · January 17, 2010

Montec wrote:

Ugg...I am supposed to show a short video at 8:00PM PST. This is not going to go well.

I better get to work and burn it to a DVD :cry :cry

Right now we're in RO mode and you can view the video, Monte.

Montec · January 17, 2010

Andy wrote:

Right now we're in RO mode and you can view the video, Monte.

Tried to do that, very choppy and soundtrack sticky.

No problem, I have burnt the DVD.

Wow..Andy...When I first joined SM I seen your post numbers and they were around 3,000 and I wondered how the heck you ever had time to post so often...now your are hitting 50G!!

You are a dedicated person for certain.

Andy · January 17, 2010

Montec wrote:

Tried to do that, very choppy and soundtrack sticky.

No problem, I have burnt the DVD.

Wow..Andy...When I first joined SM I seen your post numbers and they were around 3,000 and I wondered how the heck you ever had time to post so often...now your are hitting 50G!!

You are a dedicated person for certain.

Hi Monte, thanks

Just doing my job - well, part of it, anyhow!

This video is playing fast for me:
http://vincentlaforet.smugmug.com/gallery/6042742_wZKiA#377930419_dgxvY-L-LB

if you're having trouble, we can trouble shoot your connection, please write our Support Heroes and let us help you directly from the help desk. Thanks!

Cheers

funcrunch · January 17, 2010

RBrogen wrote:

SM I've stuck by you guys through a lot of growing pains but this is seriously making me have to consider moving. Just looking back over the past 60 days and there have been entirely way too many issues and a majority appear to be occurring right after a "Scheduled Maintenance". ... Yes I'm frustrated.

Heartily agreed. When it came time to renew (my renewal date is in early February) I decided to give SmugMug one more chance, but now I am having second thoughts about doing so. The number of outages is simply unacceptable for a professional hosting service.

Andy · January 17, 2010

funcrunch wrote:

Heartily agreed. When it came time to renew (my renewal date is in early February) I decided to give SmugMug one more chance, but now I am having second thoughts about doing so. The number of outages is simply unacceptable for a professional hosting service.

We were in read only mode for about 30 minutes. Photos viewable, but nothing with any updating. We're sorry about that, but grateful that the site stays up for viewing while we can fix hardware, network and software issues.

Yeah, I know this doesn't help if you wanted to upload or comment or buy during that 30 minute period.

We're still the only site of our kind that has such a feature as far as we know - read only mode is something we invested in so that we can at least serve up your photos.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Andy · January 17, 2010

MakeMeShutter wrote:

Will the down time effect water-marking of images?

I was in the process at the time.

please write our Support Heroes and let us help you directly from the help desk. Send details of gallery you were working on Thanks!

funcrunch · January 17, 2010

Andy wrote:

We were in read only mode for about 30 minutes. Photos viewable, but nothing with any updating. We're sorry about that, but grateful that the site stays up for viewing while we can fix hardware, network and software issues.

Yeah, I know this doesn't help if you wanted to upload or comment or buy during that 30 minute period.

We're still the only site of our kind that has such a feature as far as we know - read only mode is something we invested in so that we can at least serve up your photos.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Um, I'm sorry to sound "un-"grateful but what brought me and a number of others to this thread in the first place was that photos were not viewable; pages were loading slowly or not at all and giving connection errors. And if it were just one unplanned 30 minute read-only period a month I wouldn't be coming to this board to complain...

Oscarc · January 17, 2010

Andy wrote:

We were in read only mode for about 30 minutes. Photos viewable, but nothing with any updating. We're sorry about that, but grateful that the site stays up for viewing while we can fix hardware, network and software issues.

The problem that you're glossing over is two-fold: First, the site was unusably slow for *everyone* for some not-insignficant period of time before it was put into read-only mode. Ssecond, it's not about one 30 minute downtime; it's the pattern of repeated outages that's very concerning. Yes, any given outage isn't too long, but added up they make for a very poor user experience.

For 2009, do you have availability stats that you can share? i.e., the site was fully up XX.X% of the time, in read-only mode outside a maintainance window X.X% of the time, in-read-only mode inside a maintainance window X.X% of the time, completely down inside a maintainance window X.X% of the time, and completely down outside a maintainance window X.X% of the time. That would be very useful information, and would be a very objective measure of how reliable SmugMug really is.

Andy · January 17, 2010

funcrunch wrote:

Um, I'm sorry to sound "un-"grateful but what brought me and a number of others to this thread in the first place was that photos were not viewable; pages were loading slowly or not at all and giving connection errors. And if it were just one unplanned 30 minute read-only period a month I wouldn't be coming to this board to complain...

Yes, you are right - sorry - and thanks for the clarification- this is how such an event occurs- there's a problem, stuff's not viewable - in the old days (years ago), we'd just be down, hard, for the duration. Our engineers were able to get the site into RO mode fast and then fix the issue, thankfully.

Thanks again for clarifying and allowing me to comment again

SamirD · January 17, 2010

And I was yelling at my computer for not loading the gallery.

I checked the wordpress status 'just in case' something was wrong at SM.

Even though we're in read-only mode, I seem to have some uploads that are processing normally.

Should this be the case? If not, should I hold off starting this batch? (I've got over 100gb to upload, so an hour or two won't kill me.)

As an aside, the discussions of leaving SM because of the service level seem to be increasing. I've been there myself. It's a point to seriously think about when coming to that point. I signed onto Exposure Manager only to abandon my account when SM added video. :cry

Andy · January 17, 2010

Oscarc wrote:

The problem that you're glossing over is two-fold: First, the site was unusably slow for *everyone* for some not-insignficant period of time before it was put into read-only mode. Ssecond, it's not about one 30 minute downtime; it's the pattern of repeated outages that's very concerning. Yes, any given outage isn't too long, but added up they make for a very poor user experience.

For 2009, do you have availability stats that you can share? i.e., the site was fully up XX.X% of the time, in read-only mode outside a maintainance window X.X% of the time, in-read-only mode inside a maintainance window X.X% of the time, completely down inside a maintainance window X.X% of the time, and completely down outside a maintainance window X.X% of the time. That would be very useful information, and would be a very objective measure of how reliable SmugMug really is.

Sorry, I'm not trying to gloss over anything - I can't comment on what I don't know about right now, on Sunday evening of a long weekend

We don't hold back, are very transparent. I've asked Ops to comment, thanks for your post!

Andy · January 17, 2010

SamirD wrote:

Even though we're in read-only mode, I seem to have some uploads that are processing normally.

we're not in RO mode any more, and haveng been for a while - the all clear is here http://smugmug.wordpress.com/

SamirD · January 17, 2010

Andy wrote:

we're not in RO mode any more, and haveng been for a while - the all clear is here http://smugmug.wordpress.com/

Thank you for the quick reply Andy.

Full steam ahead!

Malte · January 18, 2010

Andy wrote:

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

:nah I'm fresh out. :cry

To me, being a non-pro, read-only=out. You can hammer away all you like at the distinction but to me, they're the same. If I've added keywords/captions to a couple hundred photos, hit save and get the read only error, I couldn't care less if people can view my photos.

It tears me up, but for the first time since I joined, I'm actively looking at options.

Malte

Andy · January 18, 2010

Malte wrote:

You can hammer away all you like at the distinction
Malte

Hey Malte, I'm so sorry for the hassle tonight. I'm not trying to hammer away at anything - and if you read my post above again, you'll see that I said RO doesn't do much good if you want to upload, do admin stuff, etc.

I'm really sorry

SM Down and/or extremely slow

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