Slow website loading

I have no idea about my bamdwidth, but can it be the cause if everything else works fine? I even can use id tab on iNat, and look at the photos there, observations are loading there, though I can’t mark anything captive, it’s forever loading, but I can add an id.
It starts any time when there’s 2-3 observations loading at once, so nothing too much, sure I do upload more as it doesn’t affect it, it doesn’t get worse than it is already.

1 Like

yeah… if your bandwidth is constrained for a sustained period of time, all sorts of strange things can happen. if you don’t know your connection’s capabilities, let me ask another way… how many photos at a time are you loading, how many megabytes is an average photo, and how long does it take to upload such a batch of photos?

1 Like

I asked, it’s 200 mb/sec. The amount of observations I described before, it starts with 2. Each photo is 4mb, number of them depends on the obs.

1 Like

i’m going to clarify a couple of things first. i think you’re saying your connection is 200 Mbps (million bits / second), and your photos are 4 MB (~million bytes).

now some math:

1 byte = 8 bits. i think OSes like Windows report MB in binary (1 KB = 1024 bytes) as opposed to metric (1 KB = 1000 bytes), which means that 4 MB would be 4,194,304 bytes. multiplied by 300 photos, you get 1,258,291,200 bytes, or 10,066,329,600 bits, total.

if your connection allows you to upload 200 Mbps, or 200,000,000 bits per second, then you theoretically should accomplish your upload in 50 seconds, or under 1 minute.

theoretical speeds are almost never achieved in practice because of many factors, but if you’re saying it’s taking more than an hour to upload, then there’s a giant gap. the most likely thing that explains such a giant gap would be that your connection is asymmetric, meaning upload speeds are slower than download speeds. but even then, there’s a bigger gap than what i would expect, since you would still be effectively achieving below 3 Mbps upload speeds. (for comparison, in my area, DSL or cable at 200 Mbps download would translate to 10+ Mbps upload, and fiber connections would be symmetric.)

so i think it’s likely there’s something that’s limiting your pipeline to iNaturalist somewhere. if you have access to a VPN (the Opera browser has optional VPN functionality built in), you could try using iNaturalist through a VPN while your upload is going (via your regular connection) to see if you notice any difference. (if the VPN makes a difference, then it’s more likely the problem is closer to iNaturalist, i think. if it doesn’t make a difference i think the problem would probably be closer to you.)

that said, i think the relevant error messages from your console screenshot are CORS-related messages. like pleary, i see no obvious reason why you should get CORS-related messages in this case. moreover, i think the particular returns_bounds=true request is only needed to display a map (to define an appropriate map extent). so i’m a little surprised to see this being called at all when you have grid view selected, and if the code can skip past that particular error, then it shouldn’t prevent things from being displayed in grid view.

next time you see this problem, it might be helpful to open up developer tools, and instead of going to just the console, pull up the the network screen, too, then refresh your webpage. if you see the console errors again but there’s still pending activity in the network screen, then i think that would suggest the problem is more of a a “taking a while to load” problem than a “not loading” problem.

3 Likes

Hour means I don’t upload them at once, there were around 300 photos and I manually added locations, so it wasn’t fast, while I wanted to use iNat at the same time on browser, but it had described problems. If I wait while everything I am uploading on the phone is fully uploaded and a little more the website is working again, but when I start again it also slowers and its weird that something is fully working but something is not. I had vpn on sometimes when uploading and it didn’t change anything for that fact. I’ll try to do what you ask next time!

more thoughts:

  1. you could also use a speed test site to see how fast you’re able to upload.
  2. i’m confused about your workflow. if you’re starting with a bunch of photos and you’re using your computer anyway, why not just connect your phone to your computer and upload using the computer? if you’re starting with observations in your Android app without locations, why not just load the whole batch all at once and then use the batch editor in the website to add the locations?

I don’t have problems with Internet, not the best I had, but still. And, hm, my workflow is the commonest stuff used, I do what and how I want, right? I’m using my computer anyway for many things, not all, and why would I do bunch upload of unidentified photos without locations? It’s a bad behaviour. My worflow has nothing to do with the problem, I was uploading that way months before it started.
My husband says that it’s ll probably because of website targeting potentional bots, as I use the same ip for phone and laptop.

if you used a VPN on your computer, and it didn’t make a difference, then i don’t think it’s any sort of IP targeting.

Well, I could be wrong as I wasn’t paying attention to that fact, but I though I used it at the same time.
Anyway, he says that errors could be because of Chrome banning some protocols.

I don’t know what exactly developer tools is as I don’t have Windows in English, but here it shows wifi work when it wasn’t loading and right after part of obs was uploaded on the phone.

the Network thing that I’m talking about is in the browser, in the same place where you found the Console earlier. when you notice a problem, open up Developer Tools and go to the Network monitor. (you’ll have to refresh your web page at this point, since the Network monitor doesn’t start recording stuff until after you open it first.)

if you see any items with a status of (pending), that means that the web page is still trying to complete some sort of action. for example, in the screenshot below, there’s an API request that’s taking a long time to complete:

if something eventually fails, the Network monitor will tell you exactly which request failed, and how long it ran before failing:

you can then also match it up with the Console messages:

so looking at the last 2 screenshots above, i see error messages here similar to some of the error messages you recorded earlier in your Console screenshot. in the case of my errors, there was a problem on the iNaturalist servers that was leading to slow/failed response for some requests.

let’s see if your screenshots of your Network monitor reveal something similar or something different…

1 Like

@pleary – i think i have some more insight into melodi_96’s error messages from before. i noticed i was getting very similar messages yesterday when i was working on page that pulls observation counts by iconic taxon and also by quality grade. this particular page makes 3 requests (since there are 3 quality grades) for each of 14 iconic taxa, for a total of 42 requests. that means if you run this a second time in rapid succession, you’ll exceed API request limits.

i thought in the past when i exceeded API limits, i would get an error message indicating that there were too many requests (similar to https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/searching-for-taxon-on-identify-stalls-out/4286/11), but it looks like the error messages that i’m getting in this situation are those CORS messages that melodi_96 was getting. so the message is a little unexpected.

here’s a screenshot of errors, etc.:

if you want to reproduce what i captured above, go here (https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_obs_counts_by_iconic_taxa.html?user_id=pleary), and then as soon as the page loads, change the user_id in the URL and pull data for a new user.

getting back to melodi_96’s original report then, she might be exceeding API request limits when she loads a bunch of observations on her phone and at the same time tries to use the website to do other stuff.

(sort of a tangent, but i remember somebody recounting to me sometime ago that they had tried to host an identification party for a CNC a few years ago. they reserved a large space with good internet, got a few extra computers for those who didn’t BYOC, bought snacks / refreshments, and invited a bunch of local experts to come in and identify stuff. but then when everyone arrived and started trying to identify all at once, they found that they could barely use the website – even beyond the usual lagginess during CNCs – and so the party ended up a bust… none of the attendees were super tech savvy, and they attributed the problem to internet connection issues. but i wonder it was just API request limit problems in that case?)

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

Obviously CNC related, but is anyone else having iNat load absolutely mind-bogglingly slowly/not load at all right now? I can’t actually ID anything, when I type in the name bar nothing loads. Can’t click on observations either, just get an infinite loading screen. All I can do is go to my dashboard, nothing else will load

Hopefully not that bad situation, but identificaion tab is hardly working anyway.

Sometimes it helps if I restart my laptop. It is like jumbos circling above a busy airport (in olden days) waiting for a landing slot.

iNat takes so long to respond, I am often seeing a withdrawn ID, followed by the same ID … because we think iNat didn’t get our ID. It will catch up as the bioblitz obs and ID subside back to normal

Does anybody know why id tab is working so slowly now? Is it a hot time for making ids and it affects it? Or it’s because id competition? It’s frustrating as photos hardly load and it takes ages to id suggestions open while different website pages work perfectly.

here’s another case where i get the CORS console error. when i try to open up the CNC 2021 umbrella project page, the page never quite finishes loading, and i eventually get a CORS error. seems pretty consistent this morning at around 6:30AM Central on 31 Aug 2021.

opening up the 2020 umbrella project is sort of slow, too, but it eventually gets data back without errors.

maybe the server is rejecting a request that takes up too many resources, and somehow that’s being interpreted on this side as a CORS problem?

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.