I’m not noticing any slowdowns. Does this happen in other browsers? Have you tried turning off extensions? Are there any specific pages you can point us to?
I notice it gets very slow at around 9:30am in my time zone, which is usually a signal to me that I should go and do something else for a while. That would be 10:30pm UTC, or 2:30pm on the west coast of the US. Do a lot of people access iNat in their lunch-breaks?
I only upload 1-4 photos with an observation, 3-8 MB per file, my workstation is hard-wired to a cable modem with 25 Mb/s internet service, I use Chrome browser, and I’m the only user on this system. This setup worked fine for 18 months then performance suddenly changed, there were no changes on my end. This was all hashed out in previous discussions, including screenshots of upload sessions in developer mode.
I use a few extensions in Chrome. If there are specific extensions that are incompatible with iNat would you please let us know.
can you elaborate? how many seconds on average is “extremely long”? do you see just a blank screen for a while and then all of a sudden everything shows up? or does all the text show up immediately and then photos load slowly one by one? or something else?
if it’s the same issue as described in https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/pictures-upload-failing-when-creating-a-new-observation-via-web-browser/34497/91, then this is a different problem than what is described in the original posts of either this or that other thread. yours is almost definitely a problem related to an extension. i don’t know what extensions you use, but ones like Ghostery have been noted to cause in other websites the kinds of errors you noted in that other post. so disable your extensions or try uploading in a private / incognito sessions, and more than likely, those errors should go away. if the errors go away but things are still slow, you’ll need to provide more information about which network requests are being slow – like a screenshot of the network activity from your browser developer tools showing which items are slow.
I have 8 active extensions including things like Adobe Acrobat, McAfee web advisor, Google Translate, and the iNaturalist Enhancement Suite. These are functions I use on a daily basis and they don’t seem to cause any difficulty with any other website or platform. I don’t know what Ghostery is and have never used it.
I disabled each of the 8 extensions, one at a time, and attempted to upload a single 8.5 MB photo. I waited a full two minutes for each trial. None of the trials completed “uploading metadata” in two minutes. I let the final trail run to completion, it took over 8 minutes for one photo. Uploading and downloading photos to my Google Drive takes a matter of seconds per photo.
I don’t know what private/incognito means in this context. Since my previous screenshots received no feedback, I really don’t know what else I can do. But, as you can see from the linked threads, I’m not the only one having trouble.