Gallery and thumbnails incredibly slow to load

[+Strotts]

Hi all,

 

Forgive me if this has been covered elsewhwere, I tried searching previous topics but couldn't see any other reference to the problem (not helped by the fact that 'gallery slow load' is an invalid search as each word needs to be at least 5 characters long )

 

I just joined Geocaching.com yesterday and upgraded to premium.

 

The problem is that gallery pictures and thumnails are incredibly slow to load - so slow that I usually don't bother.

 

Everything else on the site seems to work fine - nice and speedy. Except the gallery

 

Is this a known issue? Is it just me?

 

Thanks in advance

[+Worstseeker]

They were quick to load until the other day, now they take forever for me as well. I usually walk away from the computer for a while after I click load.

[+handleiding]

Maintenance on the site

Cannot upload pictures

[+urytrbyni]

Avatar, profile photo and images does not load at all today. Meaning they does not show at all.

Edited April 5, 2010 by urytrbyni

[+Knight2000]

Stupid hamsters.

[+Dr.MORO]

Stupid hamsters.

 

Domo!!!

 

Hampsters seems to be in the hospital or garage or something like that.

 

Got an error message "The Image upload system is currently down for maintainence. Please try again later."

 

But, then again, it's not just the upload system.

The whole image-related stuff is really slow lately.

 

~ Dr.MORO

Edited April 5, 2010 by Dr.MORO

[+marwillCZ]

Stupid hamsters.

 

They probably didn't read this today (from the Our Management Ethos):

 

Here are some "hows" we strive to embrace while we do our work:

 

Create – great products, great services, a great environment to work in

Share – our ideas, our adventures, our world

Care – about how we treat each other, our user community and the environment in which we all live

Resolve – problems and issues by proposing solutions and being open to other people's ideas

Recognize – each other's contributions and collaboration

Own – our ability to be part of the solution, own up to our mistakes

Strive – to keep improving

[+urytrbyni]

Stupid hamsters.

 

Seems the hamsters are back at work. Images, avatars, photos are back at reasonable response times

[+Strotts]

Yes indeed, the gallery images are now loading nice and quickly.

 

Thank you hamsters!

[+milvus-milvus]

Not here they're not... Hammy's on strike again?

[+GeoHigh125]

Hello,

 

Here in Europe the gallery and thumbnails are still extremly slow

[+Strotts]

Looks like I spoke too soon - horrendously slow here in the UK again this evening - but was nice and nippy this morning.

 

So probably a peak time load / capacity issue then.

 

MORE HAMSTERS PLEASE!

Edited April 6, 2010 by Strotts

[+MissJenn]

Indeed, starting about March 15, images have been taking an usually long time to load on geocaching.com. This is generally not related to the recent code release.

 

Our system administrator is currently copying all the images to a new image server, a task which slows down other image-related processes while it copies. When it’s done, we will switch to the new image server and see a dramatic performance improvement. However, as anyone who has ever noticed how many photos get uploaded to caches on a daily basis, you know that there are many, many images. It’s going to take a few more days to finish copying.

 

I am told that if we continue copying at the current rate, the first copy should finish in mid-April. Then we will run several synchronization tasks which will take a little more time. This sync will put new load on the image server, but should be a little less load than the initial copying task.

 

We appreciate your patience and feel the same frustration you do.

 

Please keep uploading pictures when you can: cache pages are so much more interesting when people take the extra time to upload photos of their adventures.

[+Corfman Clan]

Indeed, starting about March 15, images have been taking an usually long time to load on geocaching.com. This is generally not related to the recent code release.

 

Our system administrator is currently copying all the images to a new image server, a task which slows down other image-related processes while it copies. When it’s done, we will switch to the new image server and see a dramatic performance improvement. However, as anyone who has ever noticed how many photos get uploaded to caches on a daily basis, you know that there are many, many images. It’s going to take a few more days to finish copying.

 

I am told that if we continue copying at the current rate, the first copy should finish in mid-April. Then we will run several synchronization tasks which will take a little more time. This sync will put new load on the image server, but should be a little less load than the initial copying task.

 

We appreciate your patience and feel the same frustration you do.

 

Please keep uploading pictures when you can: cache pages are so much more interesting when people take the extra time to upload photos of their adventures.

I understand what you're saying but it just seems like a bizarre and inefficient way to migrate. Most migrations I've been involved with work from snapshots of the system (you do have backups, right?). So the actual movement of data does not effect the load on the current system in any way. Yes data changes between one snapshot and the current so there are increments in completing the migrations. But what do I know...

 

Anyway, things are in motion and should be much improved when the migration is complete. Thanks!

[OpinioNate]

We met today to discuss ways to alleviate the burden this copy is placing on image performance and came up with a couple of ideas. You should see better performance over the next few days while we finish copying and syncing these nearly 2 terabytes of images (1.2tb copied so far).

 

It will be worth it, however, when all images have been copied to the new drive which is 10 times faster. Our sincere apologies for the slow image loading in the meantime.