I’ve noticed that in the last month or two that iNaturalist has been running through a cloud service (forget which one but one of the big ones). I assume this is for protection against DoS attacks? [Not sure why else you would route through a third party.] I couldn’t find anythign in the forum about this and searching the blog for “cloud” returns just too much - was there an announcement?
This has resulted in observation pages taking 10-20 seconds to load for me. My workaround is to open 5 or more observation tabs at once so the end wait is less - all the pages then load at the same time (together). I assume the cloud service doesn’t like me and is trying to confirm I am not a robot or something and I might be surfing more privately than most (e.g. I delete all cookies at the end of a session). I am not experiencing a load pause for any other pages (e.g. explore/search obs, identification page, etc).
I tried two browsers on this computer with the same result but if I’m not logged in there is no delay.
Interesting; I haven’t noticed a delay in opening observation pages, but that may just be because my internet service is different. How can I check and see whether it’s running through a cloud for me the same way it is for you?
It will be running through a cloud for everyone, that’s just the way the infrastructure is set up in the background. Normally you don’t notice anything but when iNaturalist goes down you get an error message from the cloud service.
This may not actually have anything to do with that though.
Ok, just tried it on a different computer… reasonably instant load (a few seconds, understandable being far away from the servers) when not logged in, 20 second delay before the page loads when logged in.
I think I’m being picked on by the iNaturalist server. :)
PS. I give permission for iNaturalist staff to log in on my behalf for testing this observation page delay [I believe they have this power].
Not sure exactly what you’re seeing, but many photos are hosted on Amazon AWS as they provide free storage for iNat. There have been Bug Reports in the past with slowdowns/blockages when people’s IPs throttle AWS (or do something else). These seem common in Germany if memory serves, but you could dig through the Bug Reports.
I occasionally get a message from the cloud server that it’s downstream server is not running (i.e. not getting a response from iNaturalist). I think I’ve only got these twice and didn’t bother recording them specifically.
without knowing exactly what you’re seeing, i doubt there’s much anyone can do to troubleshoot anything for you. even if iNat folks were to look at their logs, if you’re saying that the server wasn’t responding, then it’s likely it wouldn’t have recorded anything relevant to your experience either.
by the way, you may want to submit a ticket at help.inaturalist.org. that’s probably the best way to report problems that are likely things that affect you only and will likely require staff assistance.
I went to a library today and used their computer on their network and same thing. Observations load quickly when not logged in but took 10 seconds to start loading when logged in.
You can use the browser’s developer tools to get more insight. I use Firefox and can hit F12 to bring that up, then go to the Network tab and load the page and it will log all the requests with timing info, size, status codes, etc.
I didn’t know about timing stuff in dev tools. I tried it out (even though I knew what was going to happen). Nothing happened for 10.56s then the page loads normally.
Seems I’m getting iNat through cloudfront.
I also tried wireshark but there is just too much traffic to see what’s going on.