Metadata loading suddenly *very* slow

[cheryl356]

Platform (Android, iOS, Website): macOS Monterey v. 12.2.1

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About):

Browser: Happens in both Firefox and Chrome, both updated to most recent versions.

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:

Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/):

Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):

After a snorkelling trip, I generally upload the images (after cropping, etc.) from my Mac. Never had a speed problem before. Camera is not new, image sizes are similar. It seems to be taking nearly 15 minutes per image to “load metadata” where before this has been a fleeting message.

Step 1: I select the images from the uploader.

Step 2: I identify and add locations

Step 3: I try to submit the observations and the whole thing sits and eventually fails.

I’ve tried with my usual batch size and now with a much smaller batch size, but it seems to be nearly impossible to get more than a few observations at once, which kind of defeats the purpose of the batch uploader.

[tiwane]

I’m not able to replicate on my device. Can you please email a few of those photos to help@inaturalist.org so we can take a look?

[dinofelis]

Just want to report that I’m having similar issues recently. I thought it was maybe my internet being slow, but if others are experiencing it as well …

[fffffffff]

I’m on phone wifi with bad connection, but I upload 10-15 photos at once without failure from uploader, so I’d check this side of things first, maybe reloading router, something like that.

[tiwane]

Is this still happening to anyone?

[cheryl356]

Yes, sorry for the late reply. Out of town for work. Still the same issue.

[tiwane]

We’re not seeing any changes on our end, so we suspect it’s something local. What would be helpful is to go to the uploader, open up the network panel in your browser, and add some of these photos. Wait a few minutes, then scroll to the bottom of the network panel and send us a screenshot of it. Should look something like this:

Those bars on the right show how long it took to upload stuff.

If you coudl send some of your photos to help@inaturalist.org (make sure they have their metadata) that would also be helpful.

To see the network panel in Firefox, open up the Web Developer tools and choose the Network tab.

[cheryl356]

The problem suddenly resolved itself as of this morning. I’m in Indonesia, so maybe a network glitch.

[MusellaRose]

Metadata has been loading very suddenly periodically over the past 6 months. It’s become exceptionally bad this past week. Currently I’m only able to upload about 5 photos at a time. When all stars and planets are in alignment, I’ve uploaded 100+ quickly.

[amzamz]

very slow uploading today. I am in Germany.

[joooom]

@tiwane Getting this a lot recently – observations get stuck on “Loading metadata…” for 15+ minutes, even with a single observation. Looks like a request to https://www.inaturalist.org/photos hangs indefinitely. Happy to provide more details as necessary.

Edit:
That request finally finished after ~8 minutes. Smaller images seem to complete faster. My network upload speeds aren’t great, but I wouldn’t expect it to be this slow – uploading the same image to a different website for comparison takes a few seconds.

[tiwane]

Can you share a photo (as an email attachment or via somethjing like Google Drive to Dropbox) with help@inaturalist.org so I can try it out?

[astmuc]

I have the same problems since a few days. After dragging a photo into the upload dashboard, the “metadata fetching” gets stuck. After a long time, it returns and metadata is shown.
The network tab in developer tools of the browser shows a network level problem of the POST.

The photo of this failed POST was uploaded in another session as https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/202808402

[tiwane]

@astmuc

The photo of this failed POST was uploaded in another session as https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/202808402

And I assume in that session the metadata didn’t load slowly?

Are you able to share the photo (Dropbox, Google Drive, or similar are best) with help@inaturalist.org so we can take a look at it and see if we can replciate it on our end? I agree it’s likely a network issue, but it’s best if we can try to replicate it as closely as possible. Knowing which browser you’re using, and whether you have any browser extensions installed, would also be helpful. Without specific details it’s very difficult to investigate a bug.

[astmuc]

• metadata loading worked for the given observantion and took about 6s
• The foto is https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UHK3JNI0lHkvRCwKlIjvQMiXJ4vUVOdX/view?usp=drive_link
• firefox 124.0 on ubuntu 22.04
• the problem appears with and without adblocker (which blocks google analytics)
• i found no simple way to reproduce the problem - beside uploading multiple fotos. It will happen seemingly random.

[EscalanteSlim]

I’ve been having similar issues for a couple of weeks now. My (unsatisfactory) work around has been to open several upload tabs and add observation photos to each, then switch to other tasks or household chores for 10-20 minutes. Then check back to see if any have finished “loading meta data”. The odd thing is that I can still get computer vision suggestions for each photo while it is stuck uploading the photo. How is that possible?

[tiwane]

I moved your post to this existing topic, which your issue fits in with.

[pisum]

@tiwane

this existing topic, which your issue fits in with

it looks like this and similar threads reporting long upload times on the web upload screen (ex. https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/loading-metadata-taking-4-6-minutes-for-one-picture-size-3-8-mb/51382) are basically the successors to threads reporting photos failing to load (ex. https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/pictures-upload-failing-when-creating-a-new-observation-via-web-browser/34497) since the functionality to retry photo uploads was implemented last year.

for folks looking for possible solutions to the problems, it may be worth looking at those other threads, and probably the older pre-retry threads should be closed if the discussion for these kinds of problems is going to be continued on this thread.

[astmuc]

The picture shows a case of slow loading (uploading) for my setup. The first four were fast, the fifth took several minutes.

The status blocked is explained in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43783829/what-does-blocked-really-mean-in-the-firefox-developer-tools-network-monitorin. Note, imho all browsers (e.g. chrome) have such limitation. This could be a hint to a connection leak in the browser app. I usually can circumvent this problem by finishing all ready observations and reloading the upload page. Then the next few uploads are usually fast for me. The reason might be that the reload starts with a fresh connection “pool”. I patched this limit from 6 to 32 in my browser as described in the link and will observe if the situation improves.

[astmuc]

This did not help too much… The blocking problem did not appear again, but the statistic stayed the same for me. After few uploads (3-10), there is one that slows down. They all terminated with a RST packet sent from the server: