Loading a single iNat observation page takes more than 20 minutes

General
1

I have a very bad connection here in the developing world, so waiting 5 minutes for an iNat observation page to load is not unusual. … but at the moment its much longer … is this due to the city nature challenge, or are there other known issues with iNat? The forum and pages not related to iNat are loading at normal speed, so I assume its an iNat database issue.

Will certainly restart posting observations, once the situation is back to normal.

2

This might fit better in the Bug Reports section I think.

3

i wouldn’t assume every issue is a bug. i think General is a proper place to start this discussion.

i don’t notice specific slowness where i am. for you, is the whole system slow, or is it only the observation page? is it only a specific observation or any observation? if only the observation page, are there parts that load quickly and other parts that load slowly? it would be helpful to understand exactly which parts are slow. take a look at these posts (and the associated thread): https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/slow-website-loading/12174/11, https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/slow-website-loading/12174/31, and try to capture the same kinds of details / screenshots.

4

Are you using a VPN?

5

I don’t know if this is related or other, but while my connection is normal speed, I since yesterday have been having awful problems with getting shown old outdated data when I open things. For example after editing records, the your observations page will still display the old data, or a record will show as research grade on that page, but then when opening it up it shows as needs ID, even with multiple ID’s.

Happening on multiple devices, so not a caching issue.

6

i don’t think this is a new problem, at least from my own experience. for me, this routinely happens especially when adding annotations. but refreshing the page usually fixes things. it’s such a minor thing though that i’ve never thought to try to troubleshoot it.

EDIT: actually, opening up the Taxon screen (https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa) has been consistently very slow for me the last day or so:

image
image2160×1440 1.04 MB

7

I’m also working in a developing nation and face similar issues.

In my experience this is generally not an iNaturalist problem, it’s a regional internet one. Where I am there are two (three) main factors that affect this:

  • time of day; evenings tend to have more internet users and speed drops enormously across all platforms.
  • condition of the line linking my region to the US (where iNat servers are); often there are outages, damage, work done on the line, etc all of which slows or even stops the connection.
  • politics (third); any time there is any sort of potential “disruption” in the country the internet is heavily censored and odd things get slowed or blocked entirely, even if they’re entirely unrelated to the subject of the block, this also happens sometimes when they make a regional change in internet policy or law, everything is throttled back as they sort out the new laws and such.

Depending on where you are it’s likely on of these, or some combination of them.

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8

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