Are the Smugmug servers overloaded?

jthomasjthomas Registered Users Posts: 454 Major grins
edited January 22, 2007 in SmugMug Support
For at least the last two or three months I have found that my galleries are extremely slow to load. Are your servers overtaxed, or do I just have too many pictures stored there?
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Comments

  • AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited January 17, 2007
    jthomas wrote:
    For at least the last two or three months I have found that my galleries are extremely slow to load. Are your servers overtaxed, or do I just have too many pictures stored there?
    Hi, thanks for posting. It's a great question.

    Short answer: No. We are constantly bringing new hardware online, investing huge amounts of money in our datacenters and infrastructure. More on that is here:

    http://blogs.smugmug.com/onethumb/2006/08/28/take-a-peek-inside-our-datacenters/
    http://blogs.smugmug.com/onethumb/2006/11/04/amazon-two-guys-in-a-dorm-0-the-next-youtube/

    User experiences can depend on lots of factors. And it sounds like you are having troubles, and we'd like to help. SmugMug hasn't been slow for months, but your site is, for you.

    Can we start by doing this: http://smugmug.speedtest.net and click on the yellow pyramid. Share the result with us? Oh and if you could post your site please, that would help. Put it in your Profile, too (You! upper left, Dgrin screen). Thanks!
  • Scott_QuierScott_Quier Registered Users Posts: 6,524 Major grins
    edited January 17, 2007
    Andy,

    Just for grins and because I can, ran this test just a moment ago and got the following:

    Firefox 2.0.0.1

    Ping: 108ms
    Download: 4914 kbps
    Upload: 1750 kbps


    I'm on the east coast and have no basis upon which to judge. Are these good, middle of the road, or poor? Just curious.
  • 3rdPlanetPhotography3rdPlanetPhotography Banned Posts: 920 Major grins
    edited January 17, 2007
    Wow Andy.. that is a heck of a nice test site. mwink.gif

    Well my DSL rated at 462k and upload at 120k. Not the best but I gues could be worse.

    Now I know why my wedding album uploads are terrible. I think I need to move.

    Scott

    Andy wrote:
    Hi, thanks for posting. It's a great question.

    Short answer: No. We are constantly bringing new hardware online, investing huge amounts of money in our datacenters and infrastructure. More on that is here:

    http://blogs.smugmug.com/onethumb/2006/08/28/take-a-peek-inside-our-datacenters/
    http://blogs.smugmug.com/onethumb/2006/11/04/amazon-two-guys-in-a-dorm-0-the-next-youtube/

    User experiences can depend on lots of factors. And it sounds like you are having troubles, and we'd like to help. SmugMug hasn't been slow for months, but your site is, for you.

    Can we start by doing this: http://smugmug.speedtest.net and click on the yellow pyramid. Share the result with us? Oh and if you could post your site please, that would help. Put it in your Profile, too (You! upper left, Dgrin screen). Thanks!
  • cabbeycabbey Registered Users Posts: 1,053 Major grins
    edited January 18, 2007
    Download: 4914 kbps
    Upload: 1750 kbps

    I'm on the east coast and have no basis upon which to judge. Are these good, middle of the road, or poor? Just curious.

    ASSUMING that the "last mile" for your link is the bottleneck (it is for a lot of people). That would appear to be a 5 meg cable modem connection, with a 2 meg uplink. The top of the line cable modem connections are 10 meg, and a fairly rare and expensive in most places. 5M connections are not even available everywhere, so they're "pretty good". It's not at all uncommon for a cable connection to have a roughly 10:1 down:up ration, so that 5M down should have 512K up, but you have 3.5 times that... so in terms of your up/down balance you're doing very very good.

    For contrast, I'm on the biggest cable connection available in town without a custom negotiated contract, I have a similar 5M down that you have, and I have what locally is considered a rather large uplink (it's not a normal consumer account, it's a business account) at 1M, but you're almost double my uplink speed.

    To smugmug's servers, I got the other day 4933 kbps down and 957 kbps up.

    (and to wrap this post back to jthomas' original question... his site loads just as fast as any other smugmug site for me... in other words, "don't blink, you'll miss it loading.")
    SmugMug Sorcerer - Engineering Team Champion for Commerce, Finance, Security, and Data Support
    http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
  • evorywareevoryware Registered Users Posts: 1,330 Major grins
    edited January 18, 2007
    Verizon DSL 1412 down and paltry 113 up. Paltry... Makes uploading to smugmug a nightmare and smugmug typically gives me errors or locks up. This was fast back in 2001, not 2007.
    with a friends Verizon FIOS in New York I get
    7000 down 1700 up
    smooth upload no problems.
    Why they don't have FIOS in the city yet I'll never understand, but I have Verizon's numbers on my cell and they will be hearing from me tomorrow.
    Canon 40D : Canon 400D : Canon Elan 7NE : Canon 580EX : 2 x Canon 430EX : Canon 24-70 f2.8L : Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L USM : Canon 28-135mm f/3.5 IS : 18-55mm f/3.5 : 4GB Sandisk Extreme III : 2GB Sandisk Extreme III : 2 x 1GB Sandisk Ultra II : Sekonik L358

    dak.smugmug.com
  • devbobodevbobo Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 4,339 SmugMug Employee
    edited January 18, 2007
    Well my DSL rated at 462k and upload at 120k. Not the best but I gues could be worse.

    My upload/download speed is 1316/209...not too bad since my adsl connection is 1500/256.

    I seriously hanging out for my local telephone exchange to get upgraded to adsl2+ in march... 24,000/1000 will be very very sweet eek7.gif
    David Parry
    SmugMug API Developer
    My Photos
  • DavidTODavidTO Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 19,160 Major grins
    edited January 18, 2007
    Mine was 3553/491.

    I guess that's pretty good?
    Moderator Emeritus
    Dgrin FAQ | Me | Workshops
  • cabbeycabbey Registered Users Posts: 1,053 Major grins
    edited January 18, 2007
    evoryware wrote:
    Why they don't have FIOS in the city yet I'll never understand

    Maybe because it's *insanely* expensive to deploy? About the only markets that they've rolled it out in are the ones where they are under very heavy competition.
    devbobo wrote:
    I seriously hanging out for my local telephone exchange to get upgraded to adsl2+ in march... 24,000/1000 will be very very sweet eek7.gif

    drool2.gif
    SmugMug Sorcerer - Engineering Team Champion for Commerce, Finance, Security, and Data Support
    http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
  • W.W. WebsterW.W. Webster Registered Users Posts: 3,204 Major grins
    edited January 18, 2007
    260 ping, 226/130 down/up
  • jmpsmashjmpsmash Registered Users Posts: 33 Big grins
    edited January 18, 2007
    i get 4944kbps down and 631kbps up, ping is 34ms.

    but i am experiencing really really slow smugmug tonight. just tonight. normally it is pretty speedy. tonight it is taking minutes to load a website. some eventually times out.
  • W.W. WebsterW.W. Webster Registered Users Posts: 3,204 Major grins
    edited January 18, 2007
    jmpsmash wrote:
    .... but i am experiencing really really slow smugmug tonight. just tonight. normally it is pretty speedy. tonight it is taking minutes to load a website. some eventually times out.
    My ISP's help desk has a recorded message explaining that connections with the US are presently affected by a 'broken cable in the USA'. ne_nau.gif
  • jmpsmashjmpsmash Registered Users Posts: 33 Big grins
    edited January 18, 2007
    My ISP's help desk has a recorded message explaining that connections with the US are presently affected by a 'broken cable in the USA'. ne_nau.gif

    interesting. i thought the smugmug have servers in San Jose. i live in Santa Clara which is just a few miles from San Jose.
  • WirelessWireless Registered Users Posts: 162 Major grins
    edited January 18, 2007
    Currently we have space in two datacenters in San Jose, CA. I've seen Comcast route me through LA before popping me over to stuff 17 miles away. *grumble* Before I left town last night, I ran a test and got around ~5000 down and ~950 up with ~46ms on a Comcast Business line (10Mdown/1Mup). Fat pipes down the street don't always yield optimal results :)

    If things have felt slow over the last couple of days, we've had database hardware issues that caused us to run some extra hot backups of our master database. That'll slow things a tad, which can easily be amplified with any net-turbulence out there. It looks like the last one we ran is done right now, though. We should be screamin' right now from a systems standpoint.

    If things have felt slow over the last few months, I'd certainly like to see a traceroute to see where you are coming from. We've continuously added new batches of servers, bigger routers, load balancers, etc., that have pushed our capacity way way above what we actually need. We're up to 6 gigabit links to the internet, and we're going to add another in the next few days. We did drop some providers, but I doubt that you'd see that big of a difference in speed.
  • jthomasjthomas Registered Users Posts: 454 Major grins
    edited January 18, 2007
    Sorry, I forgot to check "Instant e-mail notification" on my first post, so I didn't realize that there had been responses to my original post. I got disgusted last night trying to upload one picture to my smugmug site (it timed out), so I turned the computer off and went to bed.

    I'm trying the speed test now. The "ping" time was 102ms, the download speed was 50 kbs, and it seems to have hung on the upload test - no response for about 5 minutes now. I'll report when I get it.

    My ISP is Adelphia Cable, currently being taken over by Comcast. Therein may lie the problem.

    I usually have no problem with the Digital Grin. Response is very snappy. It's just my Smugmug site.
  • jthomasjthomas Registered Users Posts: 454 Major grins
    edited January 18, 2007
    O.K. I killed the speed test and restarted it. It completed this time: Ping:103ms; Download: 140kbps; Upload: 4 kbps.

    Most other web sites I visit work fine; it's just my Smugmug site that is slow.
  • jthomasjthomas Registered Users Posts: 454 Major grins
    edited January 18, 2007
    Tested again:

    75868127.pngI

    I don't know how it gets the distance, but we all know it's a lot more than 350 mi from VA to CA.
  • bwgbwg Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 2,119 SmugMug Employee
    edited January 18, 2007
    jthomas wrote:
    Tested again:

    75868127.pngI

    I don't know how it gets the distance, but we all know it's a lot more than 350 mi from VA to CA.
    Where in VA are you? That is really terrible speed for any type of broadband connection. Can you post a traceroute for us?

    Also try a speedtest to the Washington DC pyramid, i'm interested to see the results.

    FWIW, i'm in Gainesville on Comcast and my speeds are fine to smugmug
    75883702.png
    Pedal faster
  • DJ-S1DJ-S1 Registered Users Posts: 2,303 Major grins
    edited January 18, 2007
    Man, that is terrible! This is what I get from work, fairly typical -

    75891855.png

    It must be something going on with your connection since this speed test has nothing to do with Smugmug itself.
  • BeachBillBeachBill Registered Users Posts: 1,311 Major grins
    edited January 18, 2007
    Nice new speed test. Here are my results at the moment, from work:

    75903880.png
    Bill Gerrard Photography - Facebook - Interview - SmugRoom: Useful Tools for SmugMug
  • jthomasjthomas Registered Users Posts: 454 Major grins
    edited January 18, 2007
    bigwebguy wrote:
    Where in VA are you? That is really terrible speed for any type of broadband connection. Can you post a traceroute for us?

    Also try a speedtest to the Washington DC pyramid, i'm interested to see the results.
    I'm about 4 miles from Blacksburg, high-tech capital of SW VA. When I do the speed test to DC, it shows the origination point (on their map) in California!

    At any rate, here are the results to DC:

    75952915.png
  • jthomasjthomas Registered Users Posts: 454 Major grins
    edited January 18, 2007
    My traceroute to Smugmug.com [68.81.134.23] nets nothing but "Request timed out". I saved a screenshot of the output and tried to upload it to my Smugmug gallery to display here, but the upload timed out (only a 94kb file).

    Something is badly broken.
  • onethumbonethumb Administrators Posts: 1,269 Major grins
    edited January 18, 2007
    jthomas wrote:
    My traceroute to Smugmug.com [68.81.134.23] nets nothing but "Request timed out". I saved a screenshot of the output and tried to upload it to my Smugmug gallery to display here, but the upload timed out (only a 94kb file).

    Something is badly broken.

    Sounds like your firewall or NAT are blocking traceroutes. If you're using a Mac, you can do "traceroute -I" to get around it, likely.

    Otherwise you'll have to tell your firewall/NAT to allow things like traceroute & ICMP.

    Don
  • jthomasjthomas Registered Users Posts: 454 Major grins
    edited January 18, 2007
    onethumb wrote:
    Sounds like your firewall or NAT are blocking traceroutes. If you're using a Mac, you can do "traceroute -I" to get around it, likely.

    Otherwise you'll have to tell your firewall/NAT to allow things like traceroute & ICMP.

    Don
    I have the Windows firewall turned off.

    NAT => ???? I'm not familiar with this abbreviation.
  • jthomasjthomas Registered Users Posts: 454 Major grins
    edited January 18, 2007
    I tried traceroute on another computer in the household, and it does run o.k., but again I can't upload the screenshot to display it here.

    I don't know what's blocking traceroute on this machine. It is a new (November 06) Dell XPS 410 running WinXP. It may be some software preloaded by Dell which is causing the problem.

    ne_nau.gif
  • jthomasjthomas Registered Users Posts: 454 Major grins
    edited January 18, 2007
    O.K. I cycled the power on my cable modem and router, and now I get:

    76046073.png

    Maybe the problem was on this end. I'll see if it lasts.
  • evorywareevoryware Registered Users Posts: 1,330 Major grins
    edited January 18, 2007
    cabbey wrote:
    Maybe because it's *insanely* expensive to deploy? About the only markets that they've rolled it out in are the ones where they are under very heavy competition.



    drool2.gif

    Yah partly, but customers in Manhattan would suck up the extra cost for it anyway. I asked a fiber guy when they were installing it nearby in Queens and he said it's partly because they haven't figured out an easy way to wire the fiber under the streets and through all the 10+ story buildings. Plus all the electric and phone cables go underground in Manhattan.
    They have it in Westchester and Queens. Where I work in White Plains, for example, I stopped by a friends house to upload some of my pics while I was on lunch break... I can get up 50 pics in half an hour but on my home DSL it took 3:30 for the same pics.
    Considering I know Verizon in Manhattan is trying to go high speed Wi-Fi even in subways soon I'm trying to be patient...
    Canon 40D : Canon 400D : Canon Elan 7NE : Canon 580EX : 2 x Canon 430EX : Canon 24-70 f2.8L : Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L USM : Canon 28-135mm f/3.5 IS : 18-55mm f/3.5 : 4GB Sandisk Extreme III : 2GB Sandisk Extreme III : 2 x 1GB Sandisk Ultra II : Sekonik L358

    dak.smugmug.com
  • bwgbwg Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 2,119 SmugMug Employee
    edited January 18, 2007
    jthomas wrote:
    I'm about 4 miles from Blacksburg, high-tech capital of SW VA. When I do the speed test to DC, it shows the origination point (on their map) in California!

    At any rate, here are the results to DC:

    75952915.png
    It sounds to me like Adelphia sucks as much as it did when I was at Tech.

    gobble.
    Pedal faster
  • Tim KirkwoodTim Kirkwood Registered Users Posts: 900 Major grins
    edited January 18, 2007
    76099970.png

    From Franklin, OH(just north of Cincinnati)


    Tim
    www.KirkwoodPhotography.com

    Speak with sweet words, for you never know when you may have to eat them....
  • cabbeycabbey Registered Users Posts: 1,053 Major grins
    edited January 19, 2007
    jthomas wrote:
    I tried traceroute on another computer in the household, and it does run o.k., but again I can't upload the screenshot to display it here.

    Can you copy/paste the text to us here in dgrin, instead of a picture?
    SmugMug Sorcerer - Engineering Team Champion for Commerce, Finance, Security, and Data Support
    http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
  • jthomasjthomas Registered Users Posts: 454 Major grins
    edited January 19, 2007
    cabbey wrote:
    Can you copy/paste the text to us here in dgrin, instead of a picture?

    Please note my post # 26 above. My problem may be solved.
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