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.
as far as i can tell, your problem is different from all the others on the various threads you noted.
if you’ve ruled out extensions as a source of your problem, as i noted above, you’ll probably need to provide information from your browser’s network activity monitor to give a better idea of what might be happening on your end.
if the problem really is on the iNat side, it’s possible that staff may be able to check their logs and see what’s going on, but these kinds of problems usually seem to be on the client side.
Tried uploading the same photo to iNat in an incognito session. Loading Metadata took 10 minutes 53 seconds. Removed the image and uploaded again with the developer panel open. Again, took over 10 minutes. Please note that while each upload takes approximately the same amount time, each subsequent upload takes an increasing percentage of my remaining lifetime.
Screenshots of developer panel attached.
the last screenshot indicates that the bulk of the time is being spent sending the request. unfortunately, that doesn’t narrow down much where the problem is in the chain between your browser and the server. however, my guess is still that there’s something on your side since the response from the server in that same request, although a bit slow, isn’t slow to the same degree as the sending (upload) of the data.
iNat staff might be able to see something in their logs, but their logs might just say that your connection is slow.
you could try a few more things on your end:
it looks like you’re taking most of your photos on a Pixel 4a. you could try uploading from the 4a’s browser to rule out a problem on your computer.
if things are still slow on your Pixel 4a, you could go back to your computer and use different browser with a VPN. (if you don’t have your own VPN, Opera and Edge both have free VPNs.) if another browser via VPN is still slow, that would rule out the browser and the connection between the VPN and iNat.
if things are still slow, you could try a different connection altogether, such as your phone’s data plan or wifi at another location. if things are still slow, that would rule out the connection between your browser and the internet, and at that point, the only thing that i can think of that would be a problem is if iNat was throttling your particular user ID – but only for uploads – somehow. (is that even possible?)
The same photo uploaded in a couple seconds from the Pixel 4a Chrome browser, by a WiFi connection to the same broadband cable modem that serves my computer.
that means there’s a likely problem somewhere between the computer’s browser and your home gateway. so if you want to try to troubleshoot that, i would try these things:
make sure you’re uploading a file on your physical hard drive rather than from a location in a cloud
install a new browser and try from that
turn on a VPN and try to go through that
if things are still slow, then there might be a problem in the connection between your computer and the gateway. so, if you can, try connecting via wifi instead of hardwired, or plug into a different port on your router if you have to remain hardwired.
if things are still slow, there might be an issue in the drivers on your machine. make sure you have the latest drivers.
if things are still slow, there might be something wrong with the wifi or ethernet settings on your computer. you could try changing those or resetting to factory, if you can.
if things are still slow, maybe you have some sort of program – antivirus or maybe even some sort of virus? – that is causing issues.
