Saturday April 23, Read Only

Andy · April 23, 2011

http://status.smugmug.com/services/entire-site has the updates. We're sorry for the read only mode, our engineers are working on restoring full read-write (so you can login, upload, etc).

Dave English · April 23, 2011

Not been a good few weeks for Smugmug. And it's getting a little painful at times to be honest. Still going to stick with this fine company but hope these niggles are sorted.

Andy · April 23, 2011

Site's back and we're sorry for the inconvenience of Read Only mode for a while today.

Dave English · April 25, 2011

Site down yet again. This is really trying my patience. I know these things happen but.... sigh!

Andy · April 25, 2011

Dave English wrote: »

Site down yet again. This is really trying my patience. I know these things happen but.... sigh!

Short-lived, we're back and fully functional - sorry for the brief hassle!

jfriend · April 25, 2011

Andy wrote: »

Short-lived, we're back and fully functional - sorry for the brief hassle!

This short outage was an excellent example of where the Smugmug uploaders need better smarts. I was uploading 127 images using Star Explorer. Near the end of the upload, Smugmug went on the fritz. Star Explorer noticed the upload failure, paused briefly and retried a 2nd time. Of the 10 remaining images to go when the Smugmug outage started, 6 got uploaded automatically on the 2nd try. Four were left in the upload queue after Star Explorer was done. After verifying that Smugmug was up and running again, all I had to do was hit the Upload button again in Star Explorer and the four remaining images were uploaded successfully (because Star Explorer kept them in the upload queue waiting to go again). In this particular case, if I had set Star Explorer to pause longer before the retry logic (something I just updated my settings for), then it would have even gotten all the images up without intervention.

If I were using the Smugmug uploader, those 10 remaining images would have failed and would have just been shown as failed in the upload list. I would have to have noticed the failure in the list of 127 images in the uploader screen to know that they didn't all make it (not an obvious thing if it wasn't the last 10 that failed). I would have then had to start a whole new upload, respecify all the images to upload (find them all on my hard drive and redrop them in), set for duplicate suppression and start the whole upload over again. The uploader would have to go through every one of the 127 images and (hopefully) notice the duplicates just to get the 10 images back up again.

Compare all the steps and possibilities for errors in the Smugmug process to just pressing the upload button again in Star Explorer. It's software - there is a better way than what it does now.

Here are all the places the Smugmug process could fail to get the right images up:

What if you don't notice there were some upload failures (easy to do if you're uploading >10 images and the errors are scrolled off screen).
You have to respecify exactly the same set of images you originally intended to upload. Sometimes this is easy, sometimes a lot of work went into culling which images to upload and it's not simple to reproduce that list.
Duplicate suppression has to work flawlessly on the Smugmug end of things to avoid getting dups. I'm always worried about this step because a failure gives you a pile of dups which are very time consuming to sort out.
The Smumgug upload has to work again the 2nd time, and there have to be no outages during the longer time it takes to run through all the images (looking for dups)
And, if you succeed with the Smugmug process, it takes a lot longer to respecify the files to upload and for the 2nd upload to cycle through all the dups.

The Smugmug uploaders should have pause/retry logic and when an images fails to upload for a non-permanent reason, those images should be left in the upload queue ready to be tried again when the user just presses a button. Why make the user go find those images all over again? You know exactly which images didn't make it up.

Andy · April 25, 2011

jfriend wrote: »

This short outage was an excellent example of where the Smugmug uploaders need better smarts. I was uploading 127 images using Star Explorer. Near the end of the upload, Smugmug went on the fritz. Star Explorer noticed the upload failure, paused briefly and retried a 2nd time. Of the 10 remaining images to go when the Smugmug outage started, 6 got uploaded automatically on the 2nd try. Four were left in the upload queue after Star Explorer was done. After verifying that Smugmug was up and running again, all I had to do was hit the Upload button again in Star Explorer and the four remaining images were uploaded successfully (because Star Explorer kept them in the upload queue waiting to go again). In this particular case, if I had set Star Explorer to pause longer before the retry logic (something I just updated my settings for), then it would have even gotten all the images up without intervention.

If I were using the Smugmug uploader, those 10 remaining images would have failed and would have just been shown as failed in the upload list. I would have to have noticed the failure in the list of 127 images in the uploader screen to know that they didn't all make it (not an obvious thing if it wasn't the last 10 that failed). I would have then had to start a whole new upload, respecify all the images to upload (find them all on my hard drive and redrop them in), set for duplicate suppression and start the whole upload over again. The uploader would have to go through every one of the 127 images and (hopefully) notice the duplicates just to get the 10 images back up again.

Compare all the steps and possibilities for errors in the Smugmug process to just pressing the upload button again in Star Explorer. It's software - there is a better way than what it does now.

Here are all the places the Smugmug process could fail to get the right images up:
What if you don't notice there were some upload failures (easy to do if you're uploading >10 images and the errors are scrolled off screen).

You have to respecify exactly the same set of images you originally intended to upload. Sometimes this is easy, sometimes a lot of work went into culling which images to upload and it's not simple to reproduce that list.

Duplicate suppression has to work flawlessly on the Smugmug end of things to avoid getting dups. I'm always worried about this step because a failure gives you a pile of dups which are very time consuming to sort out.

The Smumgug upload has to work again the 2nd time, and there have to be no outages during the longer time it takes to run through all the images (looking for dups)

And, if you succeed with the Smugmug process, it takes a lot longer to respecify the files to upload and for the 2nd upload to cycle through all the dups.

The Smugmug uploaders should have pause/retry logic and when an images fails to upload for a non-permanent reason, those images should be left in the upload queue ready to be tried again when the user just presses a button. Why make the user go find those images all over again? You know exactly which images didn't make it up.

Don replied to some of your uploader suggestions here, too:
http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=1597749&postcount=93

jfriend · April 25, 2011

Andy wrote: »

Don replied to some of your uploader suggestions here, too:
http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=1597749&postcount=93

Yes, I saw that and it sounds like some improvements are coming (though not sure what exactly or when). Since you just had a brief outage and I was uploading at the time, I thought this anecdote was worth sharing.

Andy · April 25, 2011

jfriend wrote: »

Yes, I saw that and it sounds like some improvements are coming (though not sure what exactly or when). Since you just had a brief outage and I was uploading at the time, I thought this anecdote was worth sharing.

We're implementing a bunch of new uploading improvements based on your suggestions in the other thread, as we speak.

jfriend · April 25, 2011

Andy wrote: »

We're implementing a bunch of new uploading improvements based on your suggestions in the other thread, as we speak.

Cool.

TalkieT · April 25, 2011

Andy wrote: »

We're implementing a bunch of new uploading improvements based on your suggestions in the other thread, as we speak.

Oh sure, you'll fess up to THOSE developments :-)

Cheers - N

(ps, I really do have a grin on right now, but if I wan't grinning I might be crying :-)

Dave English · May 2, 2011

All seems painfully slow tonight. Uploading seems to work ok but the images are taking an age to 'load'.

:cry

Andy · May 2, 2011

Dave English wrote: »

All seems painfully slow tonight. Uploading seems to work ok but the images are taking an age to 'load'.

:cry

We're taking a look, Dave, thanks for the heads up.

Saturday April 23, Read Only

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