Jump to content

SUBMITTED (33056) - [BUG] Forum Avatars "Scrambled"


knowschad

Recommended Posts

My weekly Friday update.

Intermittently, img.geocaching.com times out after a few minutes and I get confused avatars.

 

WE are now able to reproduce the error.

Open an avatar image in two windows and refresh them both at the same time.

 

I have seen the problem in IE7 AND FireFox.

 

I just tried from the office, and I am not able to reproduce the problems that I experienced last night. Still using IE8 here, as well. Everything loads reasonable fast and avatars are right where they are supposed to be.

Yeah, it's not consistent. FireFox seems to give fewer problems...

 

What exactly to you mean by, "Open an avatar image in two windows"? Use the "View Image" menu option so you only see the avatar? By "two windows", do you mean two separate browsers, or two separate tabs in the same browser?

I did it in two Tabs.

 

And what do you mean by "refresh them both at the same time."? Nearly the same time is possible, but at the same time is not.

In FireFox there's a 'Refresh All Tabs' button :rolleyes:

In IE you need to be quick... :lol:

Link to comment

The easiest way to reproduce the avatar issue:

 

1) open your browser

2) open a Tab and connect to www.geocaching.com

3) open a second Tab and connect to a cachepage, scroll down to bottom of the page

4) open a third Tab and connect to this topic on geocaching.com forum

5) right click on a Tab and choose "Refresh All"

 

At the bottom of your IE browser window,

you will see "(x items remaining) downloading picture: http://img.geocaching.com/user/avatar/...jpg"

 

In the Tab you will see a wheel spinning, spinning, spinning ...

 

At the forum topic you will see scrambled avatars

At the www.geocaching.com "Recent Activity" and at the cachepage logs, some avatars are empty/not loaded.

Edited by DanPan
Link to comment

The easiest way to reproduce the avatar issue:

 

1) open your browser

2) open a Tab and connect to www.geocaching.com

3) open a second Tab and connect to a cachepage, scroll down to bottom of the page

4) open a third Tab and connect to this topic on geocaching.com forum

5) right click on a Tab and choose "Refresh All"

 

At the bottom of your IE browser window,

you will see "(x items remaining) downloading picture: http://img.geocaching.com/user/avatar/...jpg"

 

In the Tab you will see a wheel spinning, spinning, spinning ...

 

At the forum topic you will see scrambled avatars

At the www.geocaching.com "Recent Activity" and at the cachepage logs, some avatars are empty/not loaded.

 

(Back on my home computer now [iE8, XP SP3, DSL connection, Avast AV and MalwareBytes running) I'm still not able to get the scrambled avatars, but I am very definitely having serious issues loading avatar images.

Using your scenario, my cache page only hase avatars for 8 logs (one of which just popped up with a broken link red "x" in its place, although the status bar says "Done" and the tab no longer shows the "busy" spinner. The forum page, on the other hand, is still showing the "busy" spinner, and shows "6 items remaining" and only has 7 avatars loaded. Its been about 10 minutes now.

Link to comment

I am certainly not seeing any issue in Firefox 8, though. I have tried multiple times, and have tried both with and without ABP and Greasemonkey enabled.

 

Moun10bike... have you been following this?

 

Yep, but I'm out of the office until after New Year's (as are most of the devs). I'll be following up when I am back.

Link to comment

I've been trying to reproduce this behavior with the recently-supplied steps but I am still having no luck. I've tried IE9, FF8, and FF9. For those of you who have been successful with these steps, does the behavior continue when you switch to another browser?

 

In my case, no. And I haven't seen the scrambled avatars, but I do see the slowdown they are talking about... as in, "dead in the water", but again, only with IE8.

Link to comment

I've been trying to reproduce this behavior with the recently-supplied steps but I am still having no luck. I've tried IE9, FF8, and FF9. For those of you who have been successful with these steps, does the behavior continue when you switch to another browser?

I did some "refresh all" tests within one IE window, 20 connections to www.geocaching.com and 20 connections to the forum and i could not reproduce the avatar issue anymore. The avatars were loaded very fast, within 30 seconds.

 

I repeated the test several times, very weird but I always had a connection to WEB01 server.

I didn't have the chance to connect to another server. (also after deleting the geocaching.com cookies)

 

Something IS changed today.

 

I will repeat the test at different times.

Edited by DanPan
Link to comment

It is normal to see switches from server to server. It is part of the load balancing process. Based on what you are seeing I find it unlikely that this issue is server related.

I had the problem never before. Until I was able to reproduce the issue.

Even today it worked for a few hours without ANY problems and I was not able to reproduce the issue...

 

Did you test with IE8 and Chrome?

 

My tentative conclusion: www.geocaching.com website and forum are not compatible with IE8 anymore... Why?

 

Tomorrow i will test with IE9 (if i do not need to upgrade to Win7...).

Edited by DanPan
Link to comment

How to reproduce the "avatar" problem:

 

1) open an IE window and connect to www.geocaching.com

2) open a second IE windows and connect to the geocaching forums and open this topic

3) do a simultaneous refresh (F5) in both windows, the refresh will hang (timeout) on loading the avatars from the image server.

4) After the timeout: in the www.geocaching.com window no avatars are displayed in "Recent Activity"; in the forum wrong avatars appear.

 

Interesting. Doing some tests here, hope GS forgives the small hit on their image server.

 

First, sequentially loading your avatar 100 times:

 

for x in $(seq 1 100); do wget -o /dev/null http://img.geocaching.com/user/avatar/b42cb48e-8081-4b8e-959b-a38ff7ddcde0.jpg -O $x.jpg; done

 

Result: all files loaded OK.

 

Then, loading your avatar 100 times simultaneously:

 

for x in $(seq 1 100); do ((wget -o /dev/null  http://img.geocaching.com/user/avatar/b42cb48e-8081-4b8e-959b-a38ff7ddcde0.jpg  -O $x.jpg) &); done

 

Again, all files loaded OK...

Link to comment

Was just looking at these pages to see what is happening.

Looking at the postings 101 through 121 I noticed that DFX, Nebias and Knowschad were showing the right avatars.

DanPan(every posting) is showing mine (Pocileh), Moun10bike is showing Nebias for all his postings.

 

When I was browsing the Dutch forum, belonging to geocaching.nl, not part of this forum, via the laptop (windows7, IE8) used by my wife, I noticed two instances where banners, being loaded from .....http://img.geocaching.com/stats/img.aspx?txt=..., were loaded very slowly. At least one of the banners was a wrong one. This was solved after a page refresh where the images were loading in a flash.

So to me it defenately looks as if the problem is directly related to the image servers.

 

Cheers,

Edited by Pocileh
Link to comment
I will repeat the test at different times.

While writing this post. I did some "refresh all" tests.

Within one IE window, 20 connections to www.geocaching.com and 20 connections to the forum.

 

When connected to WEB01 or WEB05, i could not reproduce the avatar issue. The avatars were loaded very fast, within 30 seconds.

 

When connected to WEB08, some avatars could not be loaded in the "Recent Activity", i did not noticed scrambled avatars on the forum.

Link to comment

While writing this post. I did some "refresh all" tests.

Within one IE window, 20 connections to www.geocaching.com and 20 connections to the forum.

 

When connected to WEB04 or WEB03, i could not reproduce the avatar issue. The avatars were loaded very fast, within 30 seconds.

Link to comment

The easiest way to reproduce the avatar issue:

 

1) open your browser

2) open a Tab and connect to www.geocaching.com

3) open a second Tab and connect to a cachepage, scroll down to bottom of the page

4) open a third Tab and connect to this topic on geocaching.com forum

5) right click on a Tab and choose "Refresh All"

 

At the bottom of your IE browser window,

you will see "(x items remaining) downloading picture: http://img.geocaching.com/user/avatar/...jpg"

 

In the Tab you will see a wheel spinning, spinning, spinning ...

 

At the forum topic you will see scrambled avatars

At the www.geocaching.com "Recent Activity" and at the cachepage logs, some avatars are empty/not loaded.

Yep, I tried it again. With IE v9 I had immediate "success", scrambled avatars in forums and missing or scrambled avaters on GC.com recent activity.

But with FF I have not been able to reproduce this.

 

Another piece of info: the pictures within the forum posts are shown correctly!

Only the avatars take a long time loading and some of them are finally scrambled. Consistently: ie all Knowschad's avatars are replaced by Mou10Bike's.

 

I haven't figured out what the server is for the forums?

The culprit server for the GC.com web site is now WEB08.

Link to comment

it temporarily straightens out if you refresh while holding the shift key.

 

i have 7(64) with chrome, have same problem ... and it just happened with a challenge photo i uploaded. the photo i uploaded was replaced with my avatar photo, and my "loading" icon kept spinning until i 'shift' refreshed.

Link to comment

... with all due respect ...

 

your right ... it must be MY p.c. since no one else is having this problem ... and it happens with all of the other sites i visit. ---not---

ok, there's my daily sarcasm.

 

anyhow ... someone mentioned in here that if the code is different on one server than on all the other ones it could cause some strange behavior ... and related to that ... is this a regional problem? related to the proximity of a particular server? (this, of course would be if the servers were spread out like that)

 

i am in western new york if noone's looked into that yet.

Link to comment

I just noticed it happening to me. zoltig, and the great Moun10Bike both have my WhatTheDuck Avatar. I also noticed that it shows up on zoltig's profile page. Using IE8 on Win7Pro.

And now it seems to be back to normal. The one on zoltig's profile page is still there, so I'm guessing that's just a coincidence, that he likes the same webcomic.

Link to comment

I just noticed it happening to me. zoltig, and the great Moun10Bike both have my WhatTheDuck Avatar. I also noticed that it shows up on zoltig's profile page. Using IE8 on Win7Pro.

And now it seems to be back to normal. The one on zoltig's profile page is still there, so I'm guessing that's just a coincidence, that he likes the same webcomic.

And now Swineflew has my avatar, and the one that was on zoltig's profile is back to a photo of his dog.

Link to comment

it temporarily straightens out if you refresh while holding the shift key.

 

Which would indicate that the problem is on your PC.

 

You would think so if it were not for the fact that multiple people are reporting the same problem.

 

I use Firefox almost exclusively and had not experienced this until a few days after it started popping up here.

 

I am able to reproduce this using the instructions posted earlier but using IE9 instead of IE8 in Windows 7 (64bit).

 

If you purge your browser cache, does the issue clear up for you?

 

Not for me.

 

Here's something to ponder. I don't know about anyone else, but I have tweaked the pipelining configuration in firefox so that I can have more requests made with each page load. That means that I am essentially downloading multiple images at a time instead of them queuing up one at a time.

 

This could be one reason it affects IE more than Firefox. Just tossing that out there to chew on.

Link to comment

If you purge your browser cache, does the issue clear up for you?

I work in IT too, may I suggest you try turning your PC off then on again. :lol:

 

Nebias, you've been warned before - please either contribute constructively here, or else avoid posting.

In all seriousness clearing the cache and resetting the PC are tried and tested IT techniques.

You have mentioned the cache previously and it made no difference.

Resetting the PC hasn't been mentioned before. IT MAY HELP...

Link to comment

FYI:

 

While writing this post. I did some "refresh all" tests.

Within one IE8 window, 20 connections to www.geocaching.com and 20 connections to the forum.

 

When connected to WEB09, i could not reproduce the avatar issue. The avatars were loaded very fast, within 30 seconds.

Link to comment

Yes, I had noticed that image:

 

ava_oops.jpg

 

was a bit mixed up and grabbed a screen shot because I thought it was funny; it had corrected itself an hour or so later. I didn't post it here because I didn't realize it was being looked at as a problem.

 

It happened on 1/4/2012, about 6:10 EST.

Link to comment
Here's something to ponder. I don't know about anyone else, but I have tweaked the pipelining configuration in firefox so that I can have more requests made with each page load. That means that I am essentially downloading multiple images at a time instead of them queuing up one at a time.

 

This could be one reason it affects IE more than Firefox. Just tossing that out there to chew on.

 

Pipelining, yes, I was considering that also. But I do have it enabled in my FF and am not seeing this. Also I did some tests (again). I took all the avatars from this forum page (it's 12 distinct avatars) and repeatedly loaded them (100 times) from the server using pipelining. Everything was always loaded correctly.

 

I wish someone would finally do a Wireshark dump, it's not that hard...

 

For the record, I tried various approaches to reproduce this, even with IE9, to no avail...

Edited by dfx
Link to comment

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...