Slow International Access

wslam · July 13, 2007

I love smugmug, but accessing the website from abroad is an absolute pain.
I live in HK. This is not the first time I complain about the speed. Recently I was in the US and Canada, and finally experienced the speed you guys enjoy. From HK, the speed is absolutely ridiculous.

Now, before you blame my ISP etc, please understand that I visit mostly websites that are hosted in the US, and only smugmug consistently is a drag to use.

Every click is a 30 to 45 seconds wait (waiting for status). Then there's loading time. Loading time is not as bad as the initial lag. But overall, it is ridiculous, and it is getting worse.

I am using a 8Mbps ADSL line and have no trouble accessing any other website but my own smugmug. Throw me a bone here, and look at YOUR hosting's international setup and fix the problem.

ws

wslam · July 13, 2007

Tracert:

traceroute to photos.lam.ws (63.81.134.23), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) 0.865 ms 0.582 ms 0.480 ms
2 pcd-vta2-1-rx.netvigator.com (203.218.32.254) 20.453 ms 21.794 ms 17.747 ms
3 n219076125070.netvigator.com (219.76.125.70) 19.849 ms 20.174 ms 24.088 ms
4 n219076107034.netvigator.com (219.76.107.34) 20.302 ms 20.311 ms 26.007 ms
5 ge13-1.br01.hkg05.pccwbtn.net (63.218.145.85) 19.078 ms 19.304 ms 20.176 ms
6 layer42.ge3-2.br01.sjo01.pccwbtn.net (63.218.7.6) 171.086 ms 169.938 ms 169.652 ms
7 pri.r1-ge0-2-eq-sj.smugmug.com (206.223.117.70) 186.403 ms 181.808 ms 180.020 ms
8 hera.smugmug.com (63.81.134.23) 171.684 ms 176.017 ms 174.132 ms

Ping
Ping has started ...

PING photos.lam.ws (63.81.134.23): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 63.81.134.23: icmp_seq=0 ttl=248 time=175.454 ms
64 bytes from 63.81.134.23: icmp_seq=1 ttl=248 time=180.106 ms
64 bytes from 63.81.134.23: icmp_seq=2 ttl=248 time=175.276 ms
64 bytes from 63.81.134.23: icmp_seq=3 ttl=248 time=174.345 ms
64 bytes from 63.81.134.23: icmp_seq=4 ttl=248 time=179.328 ms
64 bytes from 63.81.134.23: icmp_seq=5 ttl=248 time=174.842 ms
64 bytes from 63.81.134.23: icmp_seq=6 ttl=248 time=175.526 ms
64 bytes from 63.81.134.23: icmp_seq=7 ttl=248 time=178.420 ms
64 bytes from 63.81.134.23: icmp_seq=8 ttl=248 time=174.109 ms
64 bytes from 63.81.134.23: icmp_seq=9 ttl=248 time=173.695 ms

--- photos.lam.ws ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 173.695/176.110/180.106/2.184 ms

Andy · July 13, 2007

I wish I had a magic, easy answer for you. But we don't get to choose the routes from you to us

Many sites you might be visiting have different setups, I can't say.

I wish I had a way to speed things up for you. I'll certainly make sure our team sees your note.

I apologize again that you have it slow

wslam · July 13, 2007

I appreciate the prompt response, but great customer service does not make up for the snail-speed I am experiencing.

The interesting thing is, when I do tracert to other photo website, the latency is often higher, but when you try to access the site via a web browser, smugmug comes dead last every time in terms of response and load time.

I do not know how many intl' customers you have. Maybe it is not worth your resources to improve the oversease experience. If you have many intl' customers, i think you may really want to look into some caching service. And if you do not have many, well, maybe I have told you the reason why not more intl' customers are signing up.

TalkieT · July 13, 2007

wslam wrote:

I love smugmug, but accessing the website from abroad is an absolute pain.
I live in HK. This is not the first time I complain about the speed. Recently I was in the US and Canada, and finally experienced the speed you guys enjoy. From HK, the speed is absolutely ridiculous.

Actually, I KINDA get this too... But it's not about the throughput, it's about name resolution.

I have my site (www.nzsnaps.com) pointing at talkiet.smugmug.com

There's a LONG delay in getting to my site whether I go to www.nzsnaps.com or talkiet.smugmug.com...

I just tested now and with a clean window, and straight after an ipconfig/flushdns, I get 11 seconds between hitting enter and seeing the first elements. After this initial SLOW load, it seems fine - not fast, but ok. (I am in New Zealand)....

I don't have any other sites that I know about that take anything like as long to start loading.

It's not my DNS either... nslookup is pretty instant (under 200ms) for both nzsnaps.com and talkiet.smugmug.com.

I hadn't bothered complaining as I figured it was something that only affected me, and once the window has loaded once it's generally ok, but you may want to see if this is what's affecting you too.

Subsequent loads tend to be quick, even if I close the window and reopen FF. If I go straight to IE, it's slow again for the first time.

Cheers - N

ivar · July 13, 2007

TalkieT wrote:

I have my site (www.nzsnaps.com) pointing at talkiet.smugmug.com

This is not the correct way of setting up a custom domain name, and is not supported by us.

Please set up a CNAME to www.smugmug.com (and an A-record to 63.81.134.23)

See for details: http://www.smugmug.com/help/professional-accounts

wslam · July 13, 2007

TalkieT
You may be onto something.
Yes the name resolution does seem to take forever here too. I have mine properly setup, CNAME... and it can still take some time.
But the problem with mine is that I do not see a dramatic improvement when I access via ws.smugmug.com. It is still pathetically slow...

ws

richmoffitt · July 13, 2007

I'm actually rather curious to see where the delay's coming from. Do you have a packet capture of the page load?

If I were having issues, i'd probably do this:
- run Wireshark
- analyze the number of TCP connections to SmugMug or other hosts
- analyze the number of big gaps in time between packets

At least then I could tell whether there were hangups with name resolution, or just plain fetching images.

I also know that there was a site outage last night and image views were kind of slow for me in the US yesterday even... but if your problem is consistent then there's something worth looking at.

Lemme know if you want to do some analysis (I do this kind of stuff for a living so it's no big deal if I get another packet dump to look at).

Best,
Rich

zaldum · July 13, 2007

same here
Same here at Spain, not as slow as WSLAM, but certainly, much slower than other hosting sites from US. I´m really happy with all the support you give in this forum, it´s an incredible work, and i REALLY want to stay in smugmug, i love your customization options and i´ve spent a lot of time building my site BUT.. the speed thing is really going worse everyday, it´ a pain to point clients to a (sometimes) desperately slow site (compared to others) and also i just can´t believe a Pro and excelent site like this dont let me see the photos in large size with smugmug style (even at 600 pix high), it just is not understandable to me in 2007. Please dont get me wrong, i really apreciate all the hard work it´s done here and really want to stay, but PLEEEASE, let me have my thumbs and Large photos (at the same time) in any other way than the filmstrip style. This and some extra "european" speed would be all i need to be Ok in this great community.

zaldum · July 13, 2007

and sorry for my english!! that IS actually pathetic

jfriend · July 13, 2007

Too many DNS lookups?

TalkieT wrote:

Actually, I KINDA get this too... But it's not about the throughput, it's about name resolution.

I wonder if there is something to the DNS lookups. When I look at the structure of a Smugmug page, I find that it uses data from a lot of different locations and every one of these is potentially a new DNS lookup.

Here are sources I see in one of my accounts:

www.smugmug.com
jfriend.smugmug.com
css.smugmug.com
js.smugmug.com
edge.quantserve.com
www.statcounter.com
c7.statcounter.com

The last two are ones I added to my own page so I could get decent hit tracking, but it is common for Smugmug power or pro users to do this. So, that's a potential of 7 DNS lookups just for my home page. Since everyone of these is at least one network roundtrip, a slow latency network will make these take a lot longer.

This whole page could be done with only three DNS lookups: the first four all combined into one, one for quantserve and one for statcounter. There very well may be some network load balancing reasons to break css and js apart from jfriend, but 7 lookups might be getting to be too many.

Also, when I look at a typical page from a competitive site, it doesn't have this many DNS lookups.

And, when I do a Smugmug search and get a page of image hits back, every single image is coming from a differnet domain making a zillion DNS lookups on that page. Couldn't Smugmug use the www.smugmug.com address for search hits and avoid this problem entirely?

wslam · July 14, 2007

Is there a way to systematically help Smugmug diagnose the problem? I am quite certain this is not a 'user' problem...

bwg · July 14, 2007

jfriend wrote:

I wonder if there is something to the DNS lookups. When I look at the structure of a Smugmug page, I find that it uses data from a lot of different locations and every one of these is potentially a new DNS lookup.

Here are sources I see in one of my accounts:

www.smugmug.com
jfriend.smugmug.com
css.smugmug.com
js.smugmug.com
edge.quantserve.com
www.statcounter.com
c7.statcounter.com

The last two are ones I added to my own page so I could get decent hit tracking, but it is common for Smugmug power or pro users to do this. So, that's a potential of 7 DNS lookups just for my home page. Since everyone of these is at least one network roundtrip, a slow latency network will make these take a lot longer.

This whole page could be done with only three DNS lookups: the first four all combined into one, one for quantserve and one for statcounter. There very well may be some network load balancing reasons to break css and js apart from jfriend, but 7 lookups might be getting to be too many.

Also, when I look at a typical page from a competitive site, it doesn't have this many DNS lookups.

And, when I do a Smugmug search and get a page of image hits back, every single image is coming from a differnet domain making a zillion DNS lookups on that page. Couldn't Smugmug use the www.smugmug.com address for search hits and avoid this problem entirely?

Hi John,

Yeah, this is a balance we're constantly tweaking. Most browsers limit the number of concurrent connections per domain to 4 by default. By having multiple smugmug.com hostnames for different media types (css, js, images) we can theoretically triple our bandwidth. The downside as you have pointed out is DNS lookups.

Like I said, we're constantly tweaking this balance and looking for the sweet spot.

Thanks for the feedback.

wslam · July 15, 2007

Can I expect Smugmug to really look into this issue?

bigwebguy wrote:

Hi John,

Yeah, this is a balance we're constantly tweaking. Most browsers limit the number of concurrent connections per domain to 4 by default. By having multiple smugmug.com hostnames for different media types (css, js, images) we can theoretically triple our bandwidth. The downside as you have pointed out is DNS lookups.

Like I said, we're constantly tweaking this balance and looking for the sweet spot.

Thanks for the feedback.

Andy · July 16, 2007

wslam wrote:

Can I expect Smugmug to really look into this issue?

Hi - yes you surely can - and we have been - if there is anything we can actually do, to speed things up for you, we're going to do it.

wslam · July 16, 2007

Thanks Andy! Support here is always great... the only thing worth sticking by smugmug these days.

But are you saying that there's nothing you guys see you could do to improve the intl access issues? If that is the case, I really have to start looking elsewhere...

wslam · July 16, 2007

Click on Control Panel just now.
Waited for 90secs... no response... just 'waiting' in the status bar.
stopped, reclick... wait another 90 secs... same thing.
arghh

wslam · July 16, 2007

btw, just to clear things up.
the issue is NOT bandwidth. Once connection begins, things are ok smooth. If I download a full size photo, I can get 100+ kbps. while not good, it is acceptable.

the problem is latency and response. something is definitely wrong. i used to work for a large ISP in HK... even though I was not in the tech department, I can tell you now that a lot of things get misconfigured for very silly reasons and can be overlooked for years before it's discovered... and by then, lots of money have been poured in to upgrade hardware etc, only to turn out to be some stupid config issues being not optimized dragging everything behind...

wizzy · July 16, 2007

Hi,

I second all above regarding the speed issue. It takes to about 15 seconds to get the first page showing of my homepage. Then it takes like 3 seconds to fill all the pictures and stuff...
I am in the Netherlands, and it seems it has gotten worse like the last 4 weeks or so.
It took like 45 seconds just now to open the Control Panel. That used to be much quicker, even at this time in the evening.

I hope my remarks can contibute to the solving of this annoying sluggishness (?) of SmugMug.

Kind Regards,

Germen!

ivar · July 16, 2007

wizzy wrote:

Hi,

I second all above regarding the speed issue. It takes to about 15 seconds to get the first page showing of my homepage. Then it takes like 3 seconds to fill all the pictures and stuff...
I am in the Netherlands, and it seems it has gotten worse like the last 4 weeks or so.
It took like 45 seconds just now to open the Control Panel. That used to be much quicker, even at this time in the evening.

I hope my remarks can contibute to the solving of this annoying sluggishness (?) of SmugMug.

Kind Regards,

Germen!

Hi Germen, welcome to Digital Grin

I'm sorry to hear about the slowness. it seems to be not so much specific to 'overseas'. I'm in the Netherlands as well, and it seems to not affect me so much. My pages load quickly and smoothly.

We are looking in to this and seeing what is causing this and of course fix it.
I'm sorry to hear it is affecting so many people.

I may get back to you and ask you if you can run a few tests for us to see if anything is going on.

Cheers,

HappySmugger · July 16, 2007

very slow here in japan, too. i ididn't use to be this way when i was viewing friend's files. last three weeks have been a killer. 20-25+ seconds to open a page plus 6-10 to load the thumbnails.

wizzy · July 17, 2007

ivar wrote:

Hi Germen, welcome to Digital Grin

I may get back to you and ask you if you can run a few tests for us to see if anything is going on.

Cheers,

That's ok...

Regards,

Germen

wslam · July 17, 2007

This is no joke. I still cannot access the Control Panel! Just times out...

Slow International Access

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