Regular bad performance

jfriend · August 22, 2010

I'm seeing spotty bad performance from Smugmug. Last night, my browser timed out three times trying to get to one of my galleries (while other web sites worked fine). Then, it started working OK, 10 mins later.

Today, it routinely takes 15 seconds to open a gallery. Sometimes it's OK, sometimes it's slow. In general, performance has been spotty the last couple weeks. Gone is the notion that Smugmug is snappy or performs well lately.

Dave English · August 22, 2010

My gallery is a little on the slow side for me aswell tonight. I am sure it'll be sorted soon enough.

Add - maybe sunday is a busy day?

gecko0 · August 22, 2010

503 Service Unavailable is my site right now.

Dave English · August 22, 2010

gecko0 wrote: »

503 Service Unavailable is my site right now.

This is the first time this has happened to me.

:cry

jfriend · August 22, 2010

One of my galleries with thousands of images in it now shows completely empty (trying to file a help request on this one, but even that is having troubles). This is bad.

Dave English · August 22, 2010

Getting late over here in England. Hopefully it'll be sorted on t' morrow, Jfriend.

zacHer0 · August 22, 2010

Hi Folks, sorry about the slowness you are seeing. The engineers are on it and hopefully will have it fixed soon.

Barb · August 22, 2010

Hi,

Sorry for the performance issues right now. We have Ops looking into it.

denisegoldberg · August 22, 2010

MakeMeShutter wrote: »

Why can't someone update the status report page?????

Why direct people to it if when getting there they find nothing????

A simple "We are experiencing problems." would help!!!

Agreed.

I am also having problems uploading plus seeing very poor performance displaying galleries.

--- Denise

rsiggins · August 22, 2010

Is this typical?
May camera club has used Smugmug in the past and experienced spotty performance. I'm considering upgrading to a pro account but based on the performance today, I'm not sure it's a good idea. This is very similar to the bad experience I had a year ago. Is this typical or am I just picking bad times?

pmbpro · August 22, 2010

Oh, not again! :-(

My Power User account is up for renewal next month and I was considering upgrading to Pro too. I'm holding off for sure now, until this -- and other bugs I'm seeing other users experience -- is dealt with.

jfriend · August 22, 2010

Still really bad performance. Taking 20-30 seconds to open a gallery.

brecklundin · August 22, 2010

jfriend wrote: »

Still really bad performance. Taking 20-30 seconds to open a gallery.

The "Show Off" gallery is intermittently showing in my auctions tonight and my site is well below optimal speed. Even when the SO gallery shows in a listing it can take 20-30seconds for it to appear...makes me look like a completely incompetent...

How many times in the past month have we actually hard these issues? And I don't mean when we see something on the status page.

As I have said before SM has nice decent people, but whatever is being done is simply not working nor is anything improving. In fact there seems to be a steady degradation in performance.

And customers who see no images do not bother to email sellers, they just back out of the listing and move on. It's the RARE customer who emails...and when this happens during peak ending periods these are completely lost customers or sales. Nice that credit cards do provide coverage for failure to perform by service providers.

Dave English · August 23, 2010

Morning. Did the problem get resolved?

Mox · August 23, 2010

This is getting beyond old. I've held back from posting about this, and I'm still going to bite my tongue, but the constant "sorry's" aren't fixing the problem. I really, REALLY don't want to move all my files to another provider and start over. I don't have the time or the energy, and I still have a lot of time left that I've paid for here. Those are the only things that have kept me here so far. Is the customer service great? Yes, but that means nothing if people can't access the site to begin with. I may not be one of your major power-player money-maker photogs as my business is fairly new, but I paid for a service that I'm not receiving as promised.

I'm finally (after months of spotty, shoddy service) seriously going to look into other providers. That makes me sad, because I really like it here when things are smooth, but to be honest that's pretty rare these days. The site is either painfully slow or so buggy that I eat up far too much time trying to upload/replace/move/copy...whatever. It rarely works the first time I try.

Disappearing photos from galleries, oddly displaying photos in galleries...none of that makes me look like a professional. I HAVE to look like a professional if I expect to be treated as such.

And for context, I've tooted smugmug's horn far and wide on multiple other forums, so I'm not just a cranky, difficult-to-please kind of customer. But this is not okay.

jfriend · August 23, 2010

Mox wrote: »

This is getting beyond old. I've held back from posting about this, and I'm still going to bite my tongue, but the constant "sorry's" aren't fixing the problem. I really, REALLY don't want to move all my files to another provider and start over. I don't have the time or the energy, and I still have a lot of time left that I've paid for here. Those are the only things that have kept me here so far. Is the customer service great? Yes, but that means nothing if people can't access the site to begin with. I may not be one of your major power-player money-maker photogs as my business is fairly new, but I paid for a service that I'm not receiving as promised.

I'm finally (after months of spotty, shoddy service) seriously going to look into other providers. That makes me sad, because I really like it here when things are smooth, but to be honest that's pretty rare these days. The site is either painfully slow or so buggy that I eat up far too much time trying to upload/replace/move/copy...whatever. It rarely works the first time I try.

Disappearing photos from galleries, oddly displaying photos in galleries...none of that makes me look like a professional. I HAVE to look like a professional if I expect to be treated as such.

And for context, I've tooted smugmug's horn far and wide on multiple other forums, so I'm not just a cranky, difficult-to-please kind of customer. But this is not okay.

Well said.

Luc De Jaeger · August 23, 2010

I also have an account for another e-commerce web site of mine (non photography related) and the Canadian site management runs our web sites with an up-time of 99.99999999999% of all time. Even no hiccups, nothing, nada,... I don't know how they do that but it's stunning. It's not appropriate publicly to say out loud who they are but I've never ever encountered such a reliable (almost infallible) up-time of web sites. They have not had the slightest down-time in years and years. Not for a single minute. It's astonishing.

Though SmugMug is almost always available and up too, there still is a difference. The minor down-times are quite annoying and frustrating, even if the down-time only takes minutes. Down-time is always bad how short it is.

For photography web sites too it's mandatory to be always up without the slightest down-time (except for some maintenance etc.) but even when I compare this with my other non-photography related web site, they are always up, even when adding new features or doing maintenance (except for some real big maintenance work that happens once in a couple of years...).

But still, I'm EXTREMELY happy with SmugMug because they try to keep the down-time as short as possible. However, they still can learn from others and I'm sure they WILL...

thumb I'm as proud of them as of my other site management because of their integrity, willingness, knowledge, taste, devotion, passion etc. etc.

lust

Luc

Baldy · August 23, 2010

I think this thread is from issues we had over the weekend and this being Monday I hope you're not having issues now.

By way of fyi and not of excuse, the cause of what we saw over the weekend is something relatively new that our ops team is grappling with. We have a lot of Sun hardware in our data centers and now that Oracle appears to have gutted Sun's support, we have quite a project to be more self-supporting, redundant, with fewer dependencies on Oracle.

We feel awful whenever we have a service interruption and we apologize.

jfriend · August 23, 2010

Baldy wrote: »

I think this thread is from issues we had over the weekend and this being Monday I hope you're not having issues now.

By way of fyi and not of excuse, the cause of what we saw over the weekend is something relatively new that our ops team is grappling with. We have a lot of Sun hardware in our data centers and now that Oracle appears to have gutted Sun's support, we have quite a project to be more self-supporting, redundant, with fewer dependencies on Oracle.

We feel awful whenever we have a service interruption and we apologize.

Baldy, I think what you're seeing is a bunch of things coming together and leaving folks frustrated and unsure about Smugmug.

Not only was there an outage this weekend, but also:

Zero updates to the Smugmug status page at all for the weekend outage. Support tells us to look at the status page and nobody puts anything there. It would help if you guys got your story straight about where we should look for acknowledgment there's a problem, progress on fix if possible and all clear when you think it's fixed.
A significant outage last week that took awhile to fix and left me panicking when several of my galleries showed as empty
New FB "Like" feature release on Thursday that looks like it basically wasn't tested beyond the Smugmug view for a regular gallery because it's chock full of obvious bugs
A thumbnail view that has problems autoloading all the thumbnails
An uploader that seems pretty busted
Lots of other site polish issues that we can't get anyone at Smugmug to express an interest in, particularly related to slideshows

It's your business, but it feels from the outside like you guys ought to slow down, examine the outstanding bugs, fix a lot of them, examine your testing process and get the site back to where it's humming along again before adding more new features that add more risk to the site.

Mox · August 23, 2010

I'm sorry, Baldy, but no. The function of the site is as buggy as ever. And still often excruciatingly slow.

I replaced a file in my site files today. This is how my thumbnails currently display as a result:

This is the 3rd time this has happened (in two different galleries). The first time I posted about it and got a "had to kick the server" reply. I don't even know what that means, but it certainly wasn't a permanent fix. Was it supposed to make me feel better when it happens again? I have to take time to delete and re-upload, which may or may not work - most of the time it doesn't. Or I can take the time to contact the helpdesk or post here. It's not a public gallery, so when it happened this evening I just threw my hands up and left it.

Additionally, half the time I go to arrange files within a gallery, they don't save. I frequently have to execute a command (copy, move, delete) multiple times before it happens. I've tried closing the browser window, refreshing, etc. I recently copied a file multiple times - it didn't show...didn't show...then suddenly there were three. It's frustrating and tiring. And hugely wasteful of my time.

And yes, the uploader is busted. Anyone who mentions it gets the pat answer "please contact the help desk." Clearly it's not an individual issue, so I think a public response in such a situation is merited, and (I think) the purpose of this forum. (EDIT: I see that it has finally been publicly addressed - thank you.)

It's also frustrating because I feel like we ARE telling you about these problems, but they're not being adequately addressed. I think it's very confusing to keep getting "all clear" messages from the technical support, when things are obviously not functionally all clear.

Thank you for chiming in.

Mox · August 23, 2010

jfriend wrote: »

It's your business, but it feels from the outside like you guys ought to slow down, examine the outstanding bugs, fix a lot of them, examine your testing process and get the site back to where it's humming along again before adding more new features that add more risk to the site.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. I couldn't agree with this statement more.

RUNYYFan · August 24, 2010

It's now Monday, August 23, 2010, 23:57 EDT and the front page for my site is looking like a hodge-podge of a basic account and a pro account. Very unprofessional and embarrassing to me. Is there an ETA as to when these issues are going to be resolved?

I'd second jfriend's comments in #21. Please get the bugs resolved before anything else is added.

Thank you.

cabbey · August 24, 2010

RUNYYFan wrote: »

It's now Monday, August 23, 2010, 23:57 EDT and the front page for my site is looking like a hodge-podge of a basic account and a pro account. Very unprofessional and embarrassing to me. Is there an ETA as to when these issues are going to be resolved?

I'd second jfriend's comments in #21. Please get the bugs resolved before anything else is added.

Thank you.

Marc, could you be a bit more specific? Attached is what your site looks like to me. As far as I know there were no site issues this evening when you posted, or at all today.

cabbey · August 24, 2010

Mox wrote: »

I'm sorry, Baldy, but no. The function of the site is as buggy as ever. And still often excruciatingly slow.

I replaced a file in my site files today. This is how my thumbnails currently display as a result:

This is the 3rd time this has happened (in two different galleries). The first time I posted about it and got a "had to kick the server" reply. I don't even know what that means, but it certainly wasn't a permanent fix. Was it supposed to make me feel better when it happens again? I have to take time to delete and re-upload, which may or may not work - most of the time it doesn't. Or I can take the time to contact the helpdesk or post here. It's not a public gallery, so when it happened this evening I just threw my hands up and left it.

Thank you for leaving it as is. I see why it looks like that in your gallery and will follow up with our folks to figure out why that image didn't produce proper display sizes. Currently it is believed to be an issue with cropping (or other edits to) small and thin png files only. (where by "small" I mean one dimension is < 100px, and by "thin" I mean that the aspect ratio is high, so the other side is > 100px.)

Additionally, half the time I go to arrange files within a gallery, they don't save. I frequently have to execute a command (copy, move, delete) multiple times before it happens. I've tried closing the browser window, refreshing, etc. I recently copied a file multiple times - it didn't show...didn't show...then suddenly there were three. It's frustrating and tiring. And hugely wasteful of my time.

When you make a change like that, it takes a little while for the knowledge of that change to percolate out to all of our servers. In the mean time, if your next page is served out by a server that doesn't yet know about that change, you won't see it yet. If you didn't get an error message when you made the change, then don't panic, we got the request and it will be visible shortly... normally it should be within a couple seconds. When we're having the issues that we hit last weekend that Baldy talked about earlier, that can take a bit longer. And some operations, like copying an image will always take a bit longer due to having to go off to the backing store and copy the file.

It's called "eventual consistency" in the engineering world. I won't bore everyone with the details of what's going on under the covers, but you're welcome to google that phrase if you're curious.

And yes, the uploader is busted. Anyone who mentions it gets the pat answer "please contact the help desk." Clearly it's not an individual issue, so I think a public response in such a situation is merited, and (I think) the purpose of this forum. (EDIT: I see that it has finally been publicly addressed - thank you.)

It's also frustrating because I feel like we ARE telling you about these problems, but they're not being adequately addressed. I think it's very confusing to keep getting "all clear" messages from the technical support, when things are obviously not functionally all clear.

Thank you for chiming in.

John Hayes · August 24, 2010

My site is still very slow. Hopefully a fix is in the works.

Malte · August 24, 2010

I am in Sweden and I see nothing of the slowness. Could it be an Akamai problem? I can confirm the problem with lazyloading on the Thumbnails viewing style.

Malte

Seamus · August 24, 2010

on a (dog slow) connection from ireland and no problems with my site loading.

wayne861 · August 24, 2010

Seamus wrote: »

on a (dog slow) connection from ireland and no problems with my site loading.

It may be fast in Europe, but here in the United States it is extremely slow. With broadband, you can fly around the internet until you go to Smugmug, then it is like being on dial up and no one at Smugmug seems to care. We just hear sorry for the problems or it looks fast to us, but nothing has been done to address the problem. Been this way for a long time and is getting worse.

Wayne

Andy · August 24, 2010

wayne861 wrote: »

It may be fast in Europe, but here in the United States it is extremely slow. With broadband, you can fly around the internet until you go to Smugmug, then it is like being on dial up and no one at Smugmug seems to care. We just hear sorry for the problems or it looks fast to us, but nothing has been done to address the problem. Been this way for a long time and is getting worse.

Wayne

Independent services rank us extremely fast - we want to know why you're experiencing slowness, and we care very, very much about it - I can tell you this because we spend a fortune on service and infrastructure to make SmugMug fast for everyone. Please write our Support Heroes with details (times, links, etc) and let us help you directly from the help desk. Thanks!

mtnbiker · August 24, 2010

man....1 min to load my homepage right now, no issues on any other page.....earlier I kept getting 301s...this is bad.

ok getting 503 errors now...sending email

brecklundin · August 24, 2010

Andy wrote: »

Independent services rank us extremely fast - we want to know why you're experiencing slowness, and we care very, very much about it - I can tell you this because we spend a fortune on service and infrastructure to make SmugMug fast for everyone. Please write our Support Heroes with details (times, links, etc) and let us help you directly from the help desk. Thanks!

Andy, fast server rankings and actually up and functional are two very distinct values.

Right now I am getting ZERO access, 503's and no images in my listings. I am genuinely going bankrupt because I put my trust in SM...I have ***** had it!! (Mod edit, I know you are upset but we can't allow foul language here.)

Regular bad performance

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