Smugmug website speed

webwizard · June 30, 2008

Lately, I've noticed that it takes much longer for images to load on my smugmug website pages than it seemed to in the past. The gallery pages load reasonably fast but clicking on a thumbnail to view the larger images takes a long time; as much as a minute today.

I changed internet providers last month, perhaps that has something to do with it. Before I spend a lot of time investigating the problem, are there some clues or tips that might guide me to make my website load more quickly?

rainforest1155 · June 30, 2008

Hi,

I'm sorry to hear about your speed problems. It sounds as if there might be a connection problem on the way from your computer to SmugMug. Could you run a speedtest for us? Go here:
http://smugmug.speedtest.net

We are the Yellow San Jose pyramid. Please let us know what the results are.

Furthermore, a traceroute might provide us with some more details on where the problem occurs.
Try these instructions to run a traceroute on a PC:
http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/2959046
That will help us see if and where any problems may be.

To run a traceroute on a Mac, follow the instructions here:
http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/3073291
Copy and paste the results to us in an email.

You can send the results to our help desk for further assistance:
http://www.smugmug.com/help/emailreal

Also have a look at this link for some speed comparison with other photo related sites:
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/05/15/speed-matters/

I hope this helps,
Sebastian

webwizard · June 30, 2008

rainforest1155 wrote:

Hi,

I'm sorry to hear about your speed problems. It sounds as if there might be a connection problem on the way from your computer to SmugMug. Could you run a speedtest for us? Go here:
http://smugmug.speedtest.net

We are the Yellow San Jose pyramid. Please let us know what the results are.

Furthermore, a traceroute might provide us with some more details on where the problem occurs.
Try these instructions to run a traceroute on a PC:
http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/2959046
That will help us see if and where any problems may be.

To run a traceroute on a Mac, follow the instructions here:
http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/3073291
Copy and paste the results to us in an email.

You can send the results to our help desk for further assistance:
http://www.smugmug.com/help/emailreal

Also have a look at this link for some speed comparison with other photo related sites:
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/05/15/speed-matters/

I hope this helps,
Sebastian

I ran the tests and sent an e-mail to the help desk. Thanks. The traceroute test showed a consistent timeout on hops 3 & 4. Could that be the problem?

anderiv · June 30, 2008

webwizard wrote:

I ran the tests and sent an e-mail to the help desk. Thanks. The traceroute test showed a consistent timeout on hops 3 & 4. Could that be the problem?

Probably not...I (obviously) wasn't able to see the results of your traceroute, but packet loss at intermediary routers isn't usually indicative of a problem. Internet routers' #1 task is to route traffic to its destination with as little delay as possible. When their CPU load goes up, they'll often de-prioritize things like replying to ICMP packets (these are the type of packets that traceroutes use).

As long as you're not seeing packet loss at the final destination, you're usually okay. High latency, though, along the way, could be indicative of a problem.

-Erik

Ferguson · June 30, 2008

Slow here also
For what it is worth, I have been having trouble the last few days also. That's both from a home DSL which is problematic, but also from a DS3 at my office which is on a tier 1 provider (AT&T) and monitored continuously.

Today for example paging around would be very fast, then very slow as in seconds between each thumbnail popping up. I just did some experimentation (on DSL) and while not really bad, when it was erratic with speed of image display the ping times were pretty steady (138-150ms). Wihle hardly definitive it really looked more like server response than network.

I also recently uploaded a bunch of pictures of my wife's trip, and have gotten complaints from two people trying to view them about delays and errors.

I don't offer this as a complaint, but just one (or a few) data points. It's still generally very usable. Just has seemed slower than in the past in an erratic sort of sense.

webwizard · July 1, 2008

Ferguson wrote:

For what it is worth, I have been having trouble the last few days also. That's both from a home DSL which is problematic, but also from a DS3 at my office which is on a tier 1 provider (AT&T) and monitored continuously.

Today for example paging around would be very fast, then very slow as in seconds between each thumbnail popping up. I just did some experimentation (on DSL) and while not really bad, when it was erratic with speed of image display the ping times were pretty steady (138-150ms). Wihle hardly definitive it really looked more like server response than network.

I also recently uploaded a bunch of pictures of my wife's trip, and have gotten complaints from two people trying to view them about delays and errors.

I don't offer this as a complaint, but just one (or a few) data points. It's still generally very usable. Just has seemed slower than in the past in an erratic sort of sense.

I switched internet providers last month from Comcast to ATT's new Uverse service but I didn't really notice this problem till this weekend.

I ran the trace route 3 times to be sure the results were consistent. Here is the result of just one:

Speed test:<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p>
Download 5729 KBPS<o:p></o:p>
Upload 926 Kbps<o:p></o:p>
<o:p> </o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
tracert www.smugmug.com<o:p></o:p>
<o:p> </o:p>
Tracing route to hera.smugmug.com [63.81.134.23]<o:p></o:p>
over a maximum of 30 hops:<o:p></o:p>
<o:p> </o:p>
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms home [192.168.1.254]<o:p></o:p>
2 22 ms 21 ms 20 ms 99-153-184-3.lightspeed.hstntx.sbcglobal.net [99<o:p></o:p>
.153.184.3]<o:p></o:p>
3 * * * Request timed out.<o:p></o:p>
4 * * * Request timed out.<o:p></o:p>
5 23 ms 21 ms 21 ms 71.144.128.110<o:p></o:p>
6 20 ms 20 ms 20 ms 151.164.43.138<o:p></o:p>
7 27 ms 27 ms 27 ms 151.164.95.188<o:p></o:p>
8 27 ms 27 ms 27 ms tge5-1.fr3.dal.llnw.net [68.142.120.193]<o:p></o:p>
9 57 ms 66 ms 57 ms tge1-2.fr3.phx2.llnw.net [69.28.171.129]<o:p></o:p>
10 57 ms 58 ms 57 ms tge1-1.fr3.phx1.llnw.net [69.28.171.97]<o:p></o:p>
11 61 ms 59 ms 65 ms tge1-2.fr3.lax.llnw.net [69.28.171.82]<o:p></o:p>
12 59 ms 58 ms 66 ms ve6.fr4.lax.llnw.net [69.28.171.206]<o:p></o:p>
13 67 ms 74 ms 73 ms tge1-3.fr3.sjc.llnw.net [69.28.171.118]<o:p></o:p>
14 84 ms 72 ms 71 ms smugmug.ge3-1.fr3.sjc.llnw.net [208.111.152.78]<o:p></o:p>
<o:p> </o:p>
15 68 ms 69 ms 68 ms hera.smugmug.com [63.81.134.23]<o:p></o:p>
<o:p> </o:p>
Trace complete.

The real question for me is where is the problem and what can I do about it? Is there a tweak or some optimization trick I can use? Does it affect everyone that comes to my site? Is there a problem at the hosting site?

I'm going to try another computer at a different location later today.

Smugmug website speed

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