smugmug outage - update

onethumbonethumb Administrators Posts: 1,269 Major grins
edited August 16, 2005 in SmugMug Support
We've got some great new features, yes, but this is getting ridiculous. I can't tell you how sorry I am that the service isn't up yet - many of us have been up 24 hours with little or no sleep for this release, and we feel your pain.

All signs point to things being done "any minute now", but the honest answer is that we've been expecting that for the last hour or two. We're way beyond schedule and we don't have any excuse. There's one single server, out of dozens and dozens, which is being unusually slow.

We could bring the site up in a reduced capacity while this last server figures out what it's doing, but I'm afraid the site would be 1/3 of it's normal speed and unbearably slow without it.

Everyone at smugmug is up, monitoring, and working on the problem. I wish there was something more I could say, but there isn't.

Thanks for your patience, no service could ask for better customers than you.

Here's two threads about some of the new things coming out as soon as this fiasco is over:

new style preview and customization changes

Don MacAskill
CEO, smugmug

Comments

  • onethumbonethumb Administrators Posts: 1,269 Major grins
    edited August 16, 2005
    For the technically curious, one of the new features required restructuring and reindexing our main image database.

    Since that's over 32,000,000 photos, we conservatively thought it would take many hours to complete.

    It turns out we weren't conservative enough, and it's taking many many hours to complete. I suspect some sort of hardware problem we haven't seen before, but we won't know until it's finished.

    We think the feature will be a great one - you'll now be able to add geography information to your photos, allowing you to view your photos overlaid on Google Maps and Google Earth. So you can quickly and easily view your latest trip to Hawaii, for example, complete with a timeline animation that moves from photo to photo in the order you shot them.

    I think it's worth mentioning that our track record for our schedule maintenance window , up to this point, has been pretty stellar. That doesn't excuse this morning - nothing does, and we'll take steps in the future to make sure this never happens.

    Thanks again for your patience, and we'll continue to post more as we get it.

    Don MacAskill
    CEO, smugmug
  • onethumbonethumb Administrators Posts: 1,269 Major grins
    edited August 16, 2005
    I think we're ready to go! Thanks again for your incredible patience - you truly are the greatest customers on earth.

    I'm doing some sanity checking to make sure everything went ok, and then the site should get switched on.

    After it's turned back on, we'll double-check again that everything is working fine, then roll out the new features and updates.

    Stay tuned!

    Don MacAskill
    CEO, smugmug
This discussion has been closed.