Help for 23

For about three or four days now uploads tend to fail a lot. Batch uploading became almost impossible as images from the batch randomly fail and you basically have to upload them one-by-one, checking after each if they got through, to keep them in order.
About a third of the images take two tries to succeed and a handful need three or even four tries.

The error message is always the non-descriptive
"These files couldn't be uploaded (possibly because the file type isn't supported):"

No idea what's wrong, but maybe the mimetype detection is on strike? Steffen, could you take a peek at the logs to see what's going on?

Can you throw me an example of ones not going through at steffen@23company.com?

Happend to me too, thought it was my internet (it fails a lot lately)

It's gotten better and worse at the same time. I had to re-upload two images five times until they were accepted. But the overall number of files that are rejected has gone done.

It's now the third day everything seems to be fine again. Upload speed is back to normal, images are no longer rejected and all thumbnails are created in time.
Thanks for fixing it!

That's worrying. Is there is way to get more information about what happened when something goes wrong (other than sending you a mail in the middle of the night to look at the servers)?
Something like a "dump debug log" link that gets visible when a file got rejected and which will include the current status of the upload processes so you can later have a look at them.
Or the reverse, for some time log all the upload/processing activity (probably to a separate machine) and have a "there was a problem" as well as a "everything went fine" link users would get in their option screen or somewhere else easily reachable but separate from the upload page. Let's say about an hour or so after the last completed upload (independent if it was successful or not) the log is deleted, as well if the user clicks the all-is-well link. Otherwise, if the user clicks the complain link you get the log. Maybe even keep a few randomly selected successful logs around to run comparisons.
I'm not sure about this — but I want the problem gone. This morning after 17 images the upload stalled (with the last image thumbnail being generated incorrectly) and when I finally restarted it the last 8 files took more than 5 to 6 minutes each to upload. It's really difficult to help you track this down as we can't give you much more information other than that something went wrong.

What I can do is upload a bunch of preprocessed JPGs and see what happens? The connection from here is pretty good in the mean time. You would like UTC timestamps?

I need to process a massive set from last weekend, so I'll start that now and see what happens when I upload the final results. Should be around 50-60 ca.10MB JPGs, so if there's going to be a problem then I should hit it. Failing that, I can upload a complete directory's worth of JPGs to prove it... but I'd rather not :)

- Bret

I can confirm this — 25 image, each about 50meg just ran through without a hitch. Thumbnails generation is also quite fast.
I guess the servers behave as long as Steffen is watching…

At the moment, upload is very slow again. But files do not fail (up to now).

> Okay, we're throwing hardware at the problem now;

Urgs. Hardware? Then it must be really bad…
Or are there so many 23 users now (which would be good)?

I'll upload less images per day next month anyway, so it should still be ok — I hope.


ps: Please also try to do something about the captchas (like only require them for the first two or three comments per user and thread), they're getting ridiculously unsolvable.